- Can skipping meals give you a longer, healthier life?
- Why low-skilled immigration helps the economy.
- Q & A on “suicide clusters,” an abnormal increase in suicides (usually among teenagers) in a short period of time. Good questions; disappointing answers.
- Parents can use IVF to select the sex of their baby. That’s illegal in almost every other country.
- Can mental health counselling make kids worse off?
- Could your personalized AI be called on to testify against you?
Category: Thursday Links
Thursday Links
- Commonwealth Fund finds major differences in health care inputs and outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. It completely ignores the role of genes.
- Earth Day good news: Over the past 60 years, GDP is up nearly 800% but emissions are down 60% even though we are still using record amounts of fossil fuels.
- New Guinea Prime Minister to Joe Biden: “We are not cannibals.”
- Joe Biden promised to never cut Medicare and “to stop” anyone who tries. He just cut benefits for 33 million enrollees in Medicare advantage.
Thursday Links
- 50 years of US industrial policy. For those of you who think it is something new.
- Getting the priorities right: The Senate Budget Committee this session has held a total of 29 hearings, 15 of which were on climate and just 3 on the budget.
- Burgess: Under a “warranty approach” drug companies would refund a pre-negotiated amount of the drug’s price to the payor and patient if the latter’s health does not improve as expected. Under a “cost sharing approach,” the high upfront cost of gene therapy would be shared by subsequent insurers after the treatment succeeds.
- 10,000 commandments: Federal regulatory burdens cost $1.94 trillion per year, or $14,500 per household.
- Argument: drug shortages are caused by monopolistic middlemen. (Surely not the whole of the story.)
Thursday Links
- Studies: hugs are good for you.
- Regular mammograms identify 87% of breast cancers. AI programs can boost that detection rate by 20%, and the cost is $40 – $100 extra. Is that worth it?
- Study: There is no evidence that buying and then forgiving medical debts that are in collections improved on average beneficiaries’ finances, access to credit, or their physical or mental health. People were even less likely to pay existing medical bills after their debt was eliminated.
- PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down for thousands of years, if at all. Turns out, they are everywhere, including our drinking water, and that could be hazardous to our health.
- The FDA has approved a test that predicts a patient’s risk of becoming addicted to opioids. Why is that controversial?