PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO It’s supposed to end on Friday. But the Wall Street Journal says that continued extensions are the left’s best way of expanding the welfare state. One reason is that in March 2020 Congress barred states from kicking ineligible people off Medicaid rolls during the emergency in return for more federal funding. Medicaid enrollment has ballooned to…
Category: John C. Goodman
Monday Links
- 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
- California is going to make its own insulin.
- Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
- Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off. “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
- Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
- David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
What Difference Does Health Care Make?
Robin Hanson’s classic article comes to this conclusion:
Perhaps the most striking puzzle in health policy is the apparent lack of an aggregate empirical relation between medical care and health. Observed variations in medical care typically have an insignificant effect on average population health, even when looking at large data sets, sets larger than those which convinced most researchers of the reality of many other influences on health.
Biden’s Operation Slow Speed
Operation Warp Speed produced a new vaccine for a novel virus in record time but when Operation Warp Speed was disbanded by the Biden administration vaccine research and development slowed from warp speed to impulse power. It’s ridiculous that it is taking longer to develop and deploy tweaks to the mRNA vaccines to deal with new variants than it took to develop the original vaccines from scratch. By the time we get an Omicron-specific vaccine that variant will have disappeared. This is no way to run a civilization.