The Lown Institute recently released its Top 10 worse examples of profiteering and dysfunction in our health care system in 2021. Lown’s so-called Shkreli Awards were named after Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro,” whose company became infamous for price gouging. After Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the 60-year old drug Daraprim, the price rose for $13.50 a pill to $750 a…
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
How COVID-19 Is Changing The Debate Over Health Reform
A revolution is occurring in the way medical care is being delivered in the United States. It is happening almost overnight. People have stopped going to hospital emergency rooms. They have stopped going to doctors’ offices. Most of the nation is self-isolating. Doctors and patients are no exception. They are communicating by means of phone, email, Skype, Zoom and other devices. Last December, Zoom was the host of 10 million video conferences a day. Last week, the company was hosting 200 million a day. Many of those were patient/doctor communications.
Is the Government Anti-Gay?
Writing at Slate, Andy Carstens asks why there is a difference in the government’s response to Covid and the response to HIV. On Jan. 18, the government launched a website enabling every U.S. household to order four free at-home kits … And, while the future of government COVID test funding is shaky, right now households can order another set of four free tests.
Kotlikoff: Beating COVID-19 with Math
A strategy for extinguishing the novel coronavirus has been outlined by Cornell University’s Operations Research Professor Peter Frazier and colleagues. They developed a group testing protocol that could release 96 percent of the U.S. population back to society within four weeks, with this percentage rising even higher thereafter. Frazier envisions initially testing 62 households at a time, and assumes, to be conservative, a very high (30 percent false negative) test rate that would require some degree of redundancy to work efficiently. All told, though, the job could be done for the entire United States with only 6 million tests per week. That’s a large number, but just three to four times the test rate we’ve already reached.