- GAO: unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic as high as $135 billion. (That is roughly $1,350 for every household in America.)
- Medicare targets cheap, generic, life saving drug for price “negotiation.” (WSJ)
- Rich countries get quality medicines; the poor sometimes get poison. But, contra NYT, the solution is markets, not regulation.
- Court tells the FDA to stop playing doctor. (WSJ)
- As a percent of income, lower-income people cheat more on their income taxes than higher income people. HT: David Henderson
- Did the eradication of hookworms cause modern allergies?
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Saturday Links
- Did the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) censor a meta study showing that lock downs had no effect on covid?
- A smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
- Robin Hansen: World population will peak in about thirty years, and then will likely fall by half every generation or two.
- How the government sets Medicare prices: it’s “a pattern of combining dated, imprecise cost reports with idiosyncratic and opaque adjustments that were not constructed to guarantee the best outcomes for the dollars spent.”
Jindal & Katebi: Better Ways to Lower Drug Costs
Former Louisiana governor (also former HHS secretary) Bobby Jindal and Charlie Katebi wrote an editorial in the Washington Examiner explaining how to rein-in high drug costs. To start with they don’t like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). President Biden championed the IRA as a way for Medicare to lower drug costs for a small, insignificant number of hyper expensive drugs. For the uninitiated, the IRA allows Medicare to identify 10 high-cost drugs and negotiate the cost down, using punitive excise taxes if drug companies refuse. Jindal and Katebi have a point. The IRAs price negotiation formula is a Rube Goldberg-type of policy mechanism that only Democrats’ legislative writers would think up.
Friday Links
- From the Committee to Unleash Prosperity: “Why is the U.S. government spending $1.7 billion purchasing 20 million covid vaccine doses for kids?” and “Gavin Newsom Admits He Was Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on COVID Lockdowns.”
- A scholarly argument for e-cigs.
- CTUP Question: How can Washington spend $1.2 trillion ($9,000 per American household) on anti-poverty programs and yet still have nearly 40 million people in poverty?
- Opioid update: The 300 counties that received the most doses of prescription pain pills from 2006 to 2013 later had the highest death rate from illicit opioids.
- Peter Coy reviews the Cato book, “Superabundance.”
- US per capita income growth rate for the past 150 years: remarkably steady at 2%.
- Nearly half of adults under 30 do not have a primary care doctor.