- Why are there so few Covid cases in Africa, compared to the rest of the world? Speculative
- Hospitals are still evading the law on transparency.
- Can a pharmacist deny a patient a morning-after pill?
- How the clothes you wear can affect your health. Futuristic
- More reasons not to tax people with the highest incomes. Insightful
- Are Democrats robbing Medicare to pay for Obamacare?
Author: John C. Goodman
Emergency Room Abuse
During her ER visit, all [Pell] received was the ice pack and the bandage. That’s it. She wasn’t treated in any other way. Doctors made no diagnosis. And she made sure that no one touched her before she knew if they were in network or not.
Pell received a bill for $5,751.
The Biggest Controversy in Pharma World: SSRIs
Scientists at University College London have conducted an umbrella review, evaluating pre-existing research, and concluded that there is little support for the idea that depression is related to abnormally low levels of serotonin.
Sahanika Ratnayake at Slate writes:
It’s true that the authors of the study are controversial figures, vocal to sometimes vituperative critics of the mental health status quo, leaving heated debates in their wake with each new publication. But the authors’ conclusion has been an open secret within mental health circles for at least a decade. The very public dispelling of this “serotonin model” has also removed a key plank in the widely believed but oversimplified myth of mental illness being caused by a “chemical imbalance.”
Pharmaceuticals Good; Price Controls Bad
We find that during the last 20 years, profits and sales by research-based pharmaceutical companies made up 1.0% and 7.5% of total health care spending, respectively. In addition, annual sales growth contributed – 4.5% to the annual growth in total health care spending, partly due to real declines in drug spending in some years when there were increases in real health care spending. We thereafter summarize the evidence base on the impact of biopharmaceutical innovation on overall health care spending, which has been addressed by a large literature on so called cost offsets of new drugs. We find that these studies report an average cost offset from medical innovation, or total cost decrease, of $151.94 per new drug. We estimate how much recently proposed US price controls on drugs in the US would raise health care spending and find that total health care spending would increase by $50.8 billion over a 20-year period.