- When the Obamacare subsidy expansion doesn’t go away after three years (a good bet), the real cost climbs from $64 billion to $248 billion.
- Health Affairs study: US has the highest administrative costs among the world’s health care systems. Of course it ignores the admin cost of tax collection – which are 25 cents on the dollar, or more.
- Keeping Africa poor: first world elites want to deny the third world access to fossil fuels.
- There is no safe level of lead exposure; but lead is added to turmeric (a spice used in cooking in South East Asia) to give it a yellow color – and it may be in spices in NYC.
Category: John C. Goodman
Tuesday Links
These are from Heritage:
- Haislmaier: Since the Obamacare subsidy extension for three more years will have no effect on premiums, or on the number of people with health insurance, it will transfer $64 billion into the pockets of the insurers at taxpayer expense.
- Moffitt: Private sector competition in the market for Medicare prescription drug coverage is working much better than anyone expected; CBO: replacing that system with price controls will result in fewer drugs, fewer cures and fewer lives saved.
- Badger: Letting the Obamacare subsidies expire not only would save money, there would be no loss of Americans with individual health insurance coverage.
- Schaefer: Using the VA system as a guide, if Medicare imposes drug price controls seniors should expect less access to critical drugs and treatments than they have today.
Thursday Links
- In Fixing Food, Richard A. Williams, a 30-year cost-benefit analyst at the FDA, says the agency isn’t protecting the public. Book review here.
- John Cochrane video on free market health insurance.
- Nearly 5 million people are paying no premium at all for their Obamacare Insurance. (WSJ) But if they had the cash, almost all of them would do something else with it.
- Next big thing in cannabis: a gentler high that offers relaxation and pain relief without the anxiety or fuzzy-headedness of regular weed.
- In Vancouver, you can get a fentanyl high for free – courtesy of the Canadian public health system.
- Kim Bellard at The Health Care Blog admits he has been wrong. About his belief in managed care? Or, managed competition? Or, his failure to appreciate the power of markets? Or, patient power? No. None of these. He was wrong because he hoped people would care more about health and more about patients than profits. Not exactly the mea culpa we were looking for.
Wednesday Links
- More on America’s unusually short life expectancy: the absolute gap is mostly overdoses, homicides, and car accidents.
- What’s wrong with BBB lite?
- Should uncompensated house work (including child care) count as part of GDP? Peter Thiel vs. Arnold Kling.
- David Henderson and Casey Mulligan: Why Biden is virtually engineering a recession.
- Jason Shafrin on Grossman’s classic human capital model of the demand for health care.