- CIA whistle blower: the agency bribed analysts to cover up the covid lab leak.
- Do you know the difference between “bagging” vs “buy and bill”? You may be spending too much for prescription drugs if you don’t.
- Panel: Sudafed doesn’t work. I happen to know it does.
- Opioid penetration map – county by county data. (WP)
- Why did the Surgeon General’s report on loneliness ignore the pen pal remedy?
- A new Human Rights Watch report: “Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.”
- Generic drugs save consumers $338 billion every year.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Wednesday Links
- How widespread is the bias against men?
- A Medicare beneficiary with obesity costs $2,018 more than a non-obese beneficiary.
- Study: obesity drugs could save Medicare as much as $100 billion per year.
- NEJM counter study: obesity drugs could cause CMS budget to skyrocket.
- Is Medicare Advantage a bad deal for rural hospitals?
Tuesday Links
- David Friedman update on what we know about covid.
- CVS Health and Cigna can charge $6,600 or more per month for the cancer drug Gleevec, a medication that went generic in 2016 and can be found for as little as $55 per month. (WSJ)
- Is telehealth a boon or a threat to rural health care.
- The reading list for Greg Mankiw’s Harvard seminar.
- HA study of people in the fifties: quality-adjusted life expectancy increased for the upper-middle economic group, but remained stagnant for the lower-middle group.
Insurers are Marking Up Drugs that Should be Cheap
Why do people buy health insurance? The most often cited reason is to transfer the risk of illness to a third party by paying a premium. University of Minnesota economist John Nyman has studied this for many years. He argues that people buy health insurance as an income transfer in the event they become sick. People who are ill often lose their income and health insurance pays a benefit that patients would use their income on. A commenter on the NCPA Health Blog a few years ago said he believed that people buy health insurance for the negotiated discounts. That makes a lot of sense.