- Health Savings Accounts after 30 years: 27.5 million individuals own one, with holdings of $105.7 billion.
- Three Medicaid reforms Biden doesn’t like: Trump era work requirements, the Tennessee block grant and the Texas waiver.
- What white bagging, brown bagging and clear bagging have to do with specialty drugs.
- A Crenshaw/Schrier House bill would give Medicaid enrollees access to direct primary care doctors.
- Insurers are using “copay accumulators” to prevent copay assistance (say, from a nonprofit to help patients with drugs costs) for counting toward the fulfillment of a deductible.
- The Biden administration is misusing the “march in rights” created under the Bayh-Dole Act to threaten to impose price controls on drugs that originally had government research funding. (WSJ)
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Beyond House Calls, the Next Big Thing is Hospital Care in the Home
Hospitals are the most expensive place to get medical care in the health care industry. Hospitals consume nearly one-third of health care expenditures, accounting for more than $1.33 trillion a year. I often advise people to never get anything done at a hospital if they are physically able to go anywhere else. For example, my wife unknowingly started to make an appointment for an outpatient CT scan at a nearby hospital.
Thursday Links
- Why we need Association Health Plans for small businesses and gig workers: Less than one-third of small companies are even offering heath insurance to their employees.
- Why doctors so aggressively pushed the Covid vaccines.
- Sanders/Cassidy bill would speed genic drugs to the marketplace.
- Mattel is making a Barbie doll with Down syndrome: “It’s set to join existing dolls with behind-the-ear hearing aids, a wheelchair, alopecia and a prosthetic limb within the company’s heavily diversity and inclusion-focused line.”
- Against bringing back the Woolly mammoth.
- An early estimate of the cost of Covid from Harvard: $16 trillion!
Wednesday Links
- Health advocacy groups: the unwinding of the health emergency Medicaid coverage rules could be a “health equity and civil rights disaster.” InsideHealthPolicy (gated)
- Ruling from the nanny state: FDA okays dogs at outdoor dining.
- Study: What If tax-subsidized, employer-provided health insurance were instead financed by a universal payroll tax? The wages of college-educated workers would be 11% lower and those of non-college workers would be 3% higher.