Progressives and people on the left often criticize dollar stores as contributing to so-called food deserts. Food deserts are parts of towns and rural areas where no large grocery stores want to operate. In addition, the presence of a dollar store supposedly makes an area less desirable for full-service grocers. The logic makes little sense to me: Dollar stores are supposedly bad because they’re not full-service grocers. Yet, full-service grocers don’t want to operate in food deserts because stores in the area are unprofitable but competition from dollar stores makes them even less profitable. What?
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Thursday Links
- Sanders reintroduces single payer Medicare bill.
- Memories: CBO trashed the single payer idea.
- Monica’s story: woman nearly died because of Georgia’s Certificate-Of-Need laws.
- Of the 355,000 nurse practitioners licensed in the United States, 88% are trained and capable of providing primary care. Yet in nearly half the states, “scope-of-practice” laws prevent that from happening.
- Rational health reform: a basic bundle of services publicly financed for all, while allowing individuals to “top up” by purchasing additional coverage.
- Why we need work requirements: Medicaid covers almost one in three Americans, or around 100 million people. Able-bodied adults make up more than 40% of that total.
AMA: Don’t Let Pharmacists Initiate Care for Covid Patients
Have you called your primary care provider lately asking for an appointment? If so it was probably farther away than you had hoped. The national average wait to see a physician is 26 days. Once you see your doctor he or she is probably cordial but somewhat hurried. The average doctor-patient encounter lasts from 10 to 15 minutes, but that figure is probably skewed by Medicare patients who require longer appointments than average. There is a significant shortage of physicians.
FTC Cracking Down on Drug Company Consolidation
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is scrutinizing mergers more carefully than in the past. The federal agency is currently trying to block a merger between Amgen and Horizon Therapeutics.
In its lawsuit, the FTC said that if it allowed Amgen’s $27.8 billion purchase to go through, Amgen could pressure the companies that manage access to prescription drugs — pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs — to boost the two extremely expensive Horizon products in a way that would inhibit any competition.