- Climate anxiety is a mental health problem.
- Biden: the pandemic is over, but not his emergency Covid powers.
- IRS is about to end the Obamacare “family glitch” by re-wring then law. (gated)
- The CDC has lost the public’s confidence. Is the answer to give it more money?
- The 340b program was supposes to support drug therapy for low-oncome patients. Hospitals are using it to rip us off.
- Why don’t men get more vasectomies?
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Is Private Equity Investment in Health Care Good or Bad? Yes!
Private equity is scooping up thousands of health care businesses across the nation. If you present at an emergency room there is a good chance you will be treated by a physician employed by a firm backed by private equity investors. In some cases, entire hospitals are being purchased or managed by firms backed by private equity. Increasingly, physician practices are being bought up by private equity investors. The profit motive is worrying many stakeholders, fearing high prices and lower quality. Kaiser Health News has a series of articles on private equity investing in health care.
Wednesday Links
- People are waiting almost four weeks to see a doctor.
- Biased poll: Americans give the health care system an “F”.
- One reason for the labor shortage: 300,000 people of working age died of Covid and another 1.9 million are believed to have gotten long Covid. That adds up to 18% of unfilled jobs.
- A giant fern has twice as many nucleotide base pairs and three times as many chromosomes as humans do. (NYT, gated)
- An unusual jellyfish can live forever.
George Halverson on Why Medicare Advantage Provides Better Care
Amputations We spend $8 billion dollars a year on amputations, and the average amputation costs over $100,000… [R]oughly twenty percent of diabetic patients will develop ulcers on their legs and feet, and … twenty percent of those ulcers currently turn into amputations… The current pattern for all Medicare patients is for 20% of those ulcers…