- CBO: competition and price transparency are the best ways to lower private sector health care costs.
- Nurse fired for refusing to admit she’s a racist. (WSJ)
- Against hormone therapy for children.
- When the dangers of one type of drug addiction become widely known, teenagers switch to another addictive drug. (NYT)
- Why did McKinsey get into the addiction business? (NYT)
Author: John C. Goodman
The Deck Is Stacked Against Boys
David Brooks in the New York Times:
American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be “school ready” than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys….
Friday Links
- Health Execs behaving badly.
- The increase in mortality among middle-aged, non-Hispanic whites is almost entirely driven by the bottom 10% of the education distribution.
- University of Rochester study: the main arguments against telemedicine are all wrong.
- Why can’t the media tell the truth about climate change?
- Study: The overall use of the twenty-three “low-value” medical services across all fifty-one states amounted to $3.7 billion over 10 years. At less than 1/10 of 1% of overall spending, not clear why we should be worried.
- Federal advisory group recommends that all Americans 19 to 64 be screened for “anxiety.”
- No diversity here: Women who get “long Covid” outnumber men by as much as four to one.
Tuesday Links
- Sen Ron Wyden: Health insurers are running so-called ghost networks, in which providers are listed in networks but don’t actually offer care. Why is he surprised?
- New CMS rule would make it easier for ineligible people to continue receiving benefits and reduce safeguards to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
- Nonprofit hospital chain sucks out profits, while leaving a poor, minority community without essential services.
- Study: More than 80% of people sampled in Greece report witnessing informal (off the books) payments for health care and the number is also high elsewhere in Europe. (Health Affairs, gated) Unfortunately the authors call rationing by price “corruption,” whereas rationing by waiting is apparently a civic duty.