- Top NIH official, Fauci adviser admits hiding emails regarding COVID origins
- One-fourth of 40-year-olds in the US have never been married.
- What’s wrong with price transparency? It’s tied to insurance billing codes instead of meaningful bundles of services patients can understand.
- Reason for more wealth inequality: longer life spans. (WSJ)
- Study: estimated cost of CMS delay in approving the new Alzheimer’s drug: $13.1 billion to $545.6 billion.
- Does cold immersion therapy really work? Probably not.
Update on Amazon’s Health Care Initiative: A Mixed Bag, Both Convenient and Convoluted
A reporter for Health Care News emailed me asking about Amazon’s health care initiative so I decided to take another look. Earlier this year I wrote about Amazon entering the health care space. One Medical is its membership-based medical service. One Medical features virtual clinical visits along with 125+ physical locations in 25 cities. It claims to break the mold for…
Friday Links
- NPR: $142,938 in medical costs for a young camper’s snakebite.
- Robert Graboyes tells the rest of the story: the family paid none of the bill.
- CBO: Over the next 30 years, federal spending averages 25.7 percent of GDP while revenues average 18.4 percent of GDP.
- Green madness: You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet.
- Drug shortages explained: Over time, price and margin erosion lead to essential medicines becoming low-margin commodities, and eventual production and supply issues create vulnerability to shortages and susceptibility to low reinvestment.
- Medicaid managed care explained: Enrollment in the lowest-spending plan reduces spending by at least 25 percent [but] rather than reducing “wasteful” spending, lower-spending plans broadly reduce medical service provision— including the provision of low-cost, high-value care—and worsen beneficiary satisfaction and health.
Primary Care Physicians’ Changing Relationship with Patients
Does your doctor recognize you when you come in? Or does he or she merely scan your file quickly before stepping into the exam room? My dog’s veterinarian knows her history mostly from memory, but I’m not convinced physicians in large cities can have that close a relationship with their patients. It’s a little too much to expect that level of relationship in my opinion. It isn’t necessarily bad if our doctors only remember us contextually. That is, at the office they remember our history when prompted with a file but would not recognize us at the mall without a prompt.