- 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.
Category: Authors
Obesity is Skyrocketing (So is the variety of snack foods)
USA Today has just published a series of articles on obesity in America, saying:
More than 4 in 10 Americans now fit the medical definition for having obesity, putting them at risk for serious health problems, including diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer. The pandemic increased the stakes. In its first year, nearly one-third of severe COVID-19 cases were blamed on excess weight.
USA Today… spoke with more than 50 experts – in nutrition, endocrinology, psychology, exercise physiology and neuroscience – and people who are intimately familiar with the challenges of extra pounds.
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.
How Does US Health Care Compare to Other Countries?
A paper from Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho delves into this:
- “The US appears to screen more vigorously for cancer than Europe and people in the US who are diagnosed with cancer have higher 5-year survival probabilities.”
- There is a similar, though not quite as strong, pattern with cardiovascular disease — it is treated more aggressively on average in the U.S., and survival odds are better.
- A detailed survey of prostate cancer evidence shows that “The combination of earlier detection and aggressive treatment in the US has produced greatly improved survival chances for men diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
- Similarly for breast cancer, America does more early screening and more aggressive treatment with the result that “the US has experienced a significantly faster decline in breast cancer mortality than comparison countries.”