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The Goodman Institute Health Blog

Wednesday Links

Posted on November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 by John C. Goodman

Why Medicare’s negotiated prices may not help patients. Formularies, step therapy and more.

Blood supply has steadily decreased for over a decade, reaching critically low levels in the past two years.

Another study on site neutral payments: Medicare Part B spending would have been $7,750 less for a hypothetical breast cancer patient.

Opinion: Bidenomics is driving up the cost of health care.

1 thought on “Wednesday Links”

  1. John Fembup says:
    November 8, 2023 at 10:53 am

    “Bidenomics is driving up the cost of health care”

    What does that actually umean?

    In general I think this article confuses things by mixing up prices vs. costs and “health care” vs. “medical care”. That’s not unusual for pundits but it does hamper understanding.

    Bidenomics is certainly driving down the value of the dollar. That reduced value is what we experience as price inflation – paying more devalued dollars for the same things. The devalued dollar is why the CPI has increased 17% since January 2021. Recall Milton Friedman won a Nobel prize for demonstrating that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Or as Yogi Berra put it, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime any more.”

    But the effect of devalued dollars on prices is a very different matter from inflation-adjusted rising costs. It seems to me the latter is our problem, not the former.

    The term “health care” is also misleading. The accurate term is “medical care”. Health care is free, or so nearly free that cost is not an obstacle to it. It’s medical care that is costly. Its training is costly. Its technologies are costly. Its treatment for complex cases is costly. Its facilities are costly. Its aging population is costly. Its medications are costly. The high cost of delivering modern medical care is the real obstacle to getting it.

    What if anything can be done about the high cost of delivering modern medical care?

    My opinion – no one who is distracted by thinking in terms of prices and the irrelevancy of “health care” will understand the problem is high medical cost. (But don’t forget Prof Jonathan Gruber who famously gloated that the public’s stupidity is a political advantage.)

    Rising prices affect physicians and hospitals too. So of course they raise their own prices. But what’s being done to help physicians and hospitals manage their costs of delivering medical care? Obamacare doesn’t help. Medicare and Medicaid regs don’t help. Too many insurance processes don’t help. I wish I could be more optimistic.

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For many years, our health care blog was the only free enterprise health policy blog on the internet. Then, when the NCPA closed its doors, the health blog stopped as well.

During this five-year hiatus no one else has come forward to claim the space. So, my colleagues and I have decided to restart the blog in connection with the Goodman Institute. We invite you and others to use this forum to share your views.

John C. Goodman,

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