- Are therapists becoming social justice warriors?
- Some NY lawmakers want to make organ transplants available to illegal immigrants, while citizens stay on waiting lists. (NYT)
- Illinois offers free health care to some illegal immigrants. Spending already balloons to $1.1 billion – five times the initial projection.
- Mass bill: prisoners would get reduced sentences for donating their organs or bone marrow to other patients.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Saturday Links
- Ross Douthat: the case against marijuana.
- Evidence that corporate ownership improves healthcare outcomes in a setting where patients have access to service pricing and quality information – the market for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).
- Everything you want to know about when gays can donate blood.
- The new mammogram recommendations can potentially lead to a lot of unnecessary, and potentially harmful, care.
- The downside of privacy regulations: As of November 2021, at least 70% of healthcare providers still exchange medical information by fax because historically there has been no option to send EMRs using modern internet services.
- Why more regulation leads to more monopoly power.
Thursday Links
- The AMA’s Advancing Health Equity guide is a joke. But after the laughter dies, it is also very sad.
- British Columbia to send thousands of Canadian cancer patients to Washington state for treatment.
- Paragon: Medicare’s venture into “value based care” has done little except add administrative burden and a set of quality metrics that are easily gamed and don’t translate into better or more efficient care.
- Trump’s executive order allowing employers to fund individually owned health insurance is taking hold.
Addicted to Drug Money: States Not Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Addiction Treatment
In was the dawn of the 21st Century when untreated pain became a public health priority. In 1990 Dr. Mitchel Max, then president of the American Pain Society, authored an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine lamenting the lack of progress treating pain over the previous two decades. Within a few years Joint Commission jumped on the bandwagon and published Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. Thus began America’s experiment in aggressive pain treatment and its descent into opioid addiction and overdose deaths.