- Free covid tests are back.
- Governments at all levels spend nearly $2 trillion annually to fight poverty (not counting payments related to COVID-19). Stretching back to 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson first declared his War on Poverty, anti‐poverty spending has totaled more than $30 trillion.
- Tyler Cowen: It is estimated that about 40% of Americans are obese. If the government paid for those drugs for everyone who might benefit from them, it could cost more than $1 trillion annually, almost as much as the US spends on Medicare each year, (Bloomberg)
- Study: 60-year-old rural men can now expect to live two years less than their urban counterparts – a gap that’s nearly tripled from two decades ago.
- Study: Both moderate and light drinkers experience more cancer deaths than occasional drinkers.
Author: John C. Goodman
Saturday Links
- Out of more than 50 alternative payment models (APM) that CMS has implemented only six have shown statistically significant cost savings.
- Chronic diseases cause 75% of all global deaths.
- A liberal admits Trump was right about vaping.
- The pros and cons of noncompete clauses for physicians.
- Why decriminalization can lead to lower drug use.
- How deregulation is needed to allow US medical innovation to go forward.
Friday Links
- The Risky Research Review Act would put guard rails around the ability of scientists to engage in gain of function research.
- Paragon has 12 reforms to federal healthcare spending that would curb spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years.
- Two ways to boost the supply of transplantable organs.
- AEI on the need for legalizing the market for human organs.
- An unintended consequence of EOTC: when the credit is more generous, single adult daughters work more and spend less time on caregiving for their elderly parents. I am not against including care giving as a social useful activity under the EITC. I am against giving away money with no strings attached at all.
- US brand drugs sell for about three times what people pay in other countries; but US generics are one-third less than the prices abroad.
- Patients who think they are communicating with their doctors through MyChart could unknowingly be linking to a AI program called Art. If unedited by a human, Art’s responses risk serious harm about 7% of the time. (NYT)
Thursday Links
- Asthma inhalers contribute to global warming?
- Three reasons you may not be able to get the generic drug you need.
- Republicans don’t want another fight over Obamacare. Too bad, it desperately needs reform.
- “The United States is not a manufacturing backwater…. The country has the second-largest share of manufacturing output – 15.9 percent – trailing only China at 31.6 percent.
- Washington DC now has the country’s richest rich people.