- Breakthrough medical technology is working: Cancer drugs that function like heat-seeking missiles deliver chemicals directly to tumors.
- After years of writing and talking about health care, Jeff Goldsmith finally experiences it: the good, bad, and ugly.
- A downside of the IRA Act’s cap on out-of-pocket patient costs: “We anticipate that the use of tools like prior authorization or step therapy will increase in frequency or intensity. For providers, this will potentially increase administrative burdens and may affect the timeliness of care delivery.”
- How could a new budget commission succeed, given the failure of Simpson-Bowles? On cutting waste in Defense, Alam Simpson told me we have 1,000 bases overseas.
Author: John C. Goodman
Wednesday Links
- Against FDA regulation of lab tests.
- More than $185 million of Covid relief money has been approved for projects related to golf courses. The Biden Treasury Department wants to let states spend $90 billion more of “leftover emergency money.”
- In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, per capita mortality varied by more than a hundredfold across countries, despite most implementing similar nonpharmaceutical interventions.
- Shouldn’t hospitals know if their patients are dead? “About 19 percent of deceased patients overall were deemed alive in their records. What’s more, dead patients received more than 200 telephone calls and 300 portal messages after their death.”
Why Are Nonprofit Hospitals Focused More on Dollars Than Patients?
Nonprofit hospitals … are supposed to serve the public good in exchange for being exempt from federal, state and local taxes — exemptions that added up to $28 billion in 2020.
[Yet] detailed media reports show them hounding poor patients for money, cutting nurse staffing too aggressively and giving preferential treatment to the rich over the poor….
Tuesday Links
- British Medicaid Journal: “The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.”
- How the newspapers are getting life expectancy projections wrong.
- Cigna Removes Prior Authorization for 25% of Medical Services.
- Merrill Matthews explains why seniors are over-paying for drugs.
- Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue. HT: Tyler