Tuesday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman

Gorman and Goodman: Texas was right not to expand Medicaid.

Schaeffer Center: Medicare Advantage enrolls lower-spending people, leading to large overpayments.  

Why DC is so dangerous:  “the overwhelming preponderance of lethal violence is carried out with illegal weapons”  and “most gun arrests don’t lead to charges.”

Prenatal tests: Very accurate for common genetic disorders like Down syndrome. But for rare diseases, the positive results were wrong 80 percent to 93 percent of the time

Janitor cut the power to a lab freezer, destroying decades’ worth of research materials valued at nearly $1 million.

2 thoughts on “Tuesday Links”

  1. Thanks for posting the article on expanding Medicaid (or not).

    The article has two strong points: a. the lack of funding for border hospitals is terrible, given the lack of any decent immigration policy; b. the lack of support for disabled persons needing home care is also terrible.

    The rest of article is kind of a stretch. The authors state that new Medicaid recipients have dropped their old private coverage, which paid hospitals better.

    From my observation, the new Medicaid recipients generally had no coverage at all before, and hospitals got next to nothing for treating them (except bad debt). Medicaid rates are an improement over nothing.

    Reply

  2. There was a detailed study about ten years ago when Oregon expanded Medicaid through a lottery. The study found little improvement in health for the new recipients, but a large improvement in financial status for the recipients,,,,they now had much less in medical debt, and no harassment from debt collectors. (Russ Roberts had a long show about this, and subsequent studies of the ACA have found the same result — see Dylan Scott’s writing.)

    Now one can argue that expanding Medicaid is a very costly way of achieving this improvement,
    But Dr, Goodman and Linda Gorman write as though the financial relief never happened,

    Reply

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