The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beefing up its scrutiny of private equity investments in health care. This past September the FTC sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) and the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in Houston federal court. The investors are accused of buying up a significant portion of large anesthesia practices in major Texas cities, allowing them to aggressively boost prices. FTC chair, Lina Khan, claims private equity investors “bought up the largest anesthesiology practices, then jacked up prices and entered into price-setting and market-allocation schemes.” Research has found that physician prices rose due to private equity investments.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Thursday Links
- Alex Tabarrok reviews The Big Fail. Best sentence: “Anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert opinion prior to COVID.”
- Biden invokes the Defense Production Act to stem drug shortages. This is a Cold War-era law that lets the government require private companies to make materials deemed necessary for national defense.
- Jason Furman on the 2017 Trump tax reform bill: It showed “taxes actually do matter,” adding that it provided “the most convincing estimates of the response of investment to corporate tax changes that I have ever seen.”
- Imagine getting medical-test results within minutes or seconds, before you leave the doctor’s office. That’s more likely for your dog than it is for you. (WSJ)
- Why cold symptoms are worse at night. (NYT)
Wednesday Links
- Kaiser: the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was $23,968 in 2023.
- Study: Fentanyl “accounts for 90% of all opioid deaths… We show that a substantial amount of fentanyl smuggling occurs via legal trade flows.”
- In 2021, the U.S. spent $1,432 per capita on pharmaceuticals compared to only $517 in the UK. One reason: the value of a statistical life in the UK is pegged at £20,000 – £30,000, compared to $100,000 – $150,000 in the US.
- Headline I wish hadn’t seen: New York City will pay homeowners up to $395,00 to build an extra dwelling in their garage or basement to help ease the housing shortage.
- Gene Steuerle’s NYT piece on how much seniors get from the government’s elderly entitlement programs is no longer behind a paywall. Fascinating graphs.
Tuesday Links
- Why do hospitalizations increase in the last quarter of the year?
- Scientists use AI to find an antibiotic for a multidrug-resistant bacteria.
- Scientists have managed to preserve rat kidneys for 100 days. Apparently, that’s good news for humans.
- For medical student education, is a virtual cadaver as good (or better) than a real one?
- Are crisis pregnancy centers deceiving pregnant mothers?