- Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during the pandemic, half were women, and nearly half were people of color.
- More than $200 billion (17%) of small business Covid relief lost to fraud.
- Is pickle ball too noisy?
- College tuition explained: it’s price discrimination.
- GOP Senators: “We were shocked to see the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announce via a tweet that the Administration has ‘taken steps for temporary importation of certain foreign-approved versions of cisplatin products’ – meaning from China – without otherwise informing American oncologists.”
Category: Health Economics & Costs
NYT: We’re in a Golden Age of Medicine
The New York Times announced we’re in a Golden Age of medicine, saying:
We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation — the limits of which aren’t even clear yet.
Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”
Wednesday Links
- An argument that life on earth did not begin on earth.
- Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work — Depression-era work rates for American men ages 25–54.
- David Friedman asks: why are poor people fatter than the nonpoor? The conventional answer is that fast foods are cheaper than healthy foods. But Friedman shows that the reverse is true – per calorie consumed, nutritious food is half the cost of fast food.
- Without fungi, we not only wouldn’t be alive, we never would have evolved.
- In Uganda, where nearly half the people eat fewer calories than they need each day, excess fat is often a sign of wealth.
Study: Physician-Owed Hospitals Have Lower Prices, Boosts Competition
The Affordable Care Act, a misnomer if there ever was one, has been the law of the land for 13 years now. One of the many ill-thought-out provisions was one that banned further development of hospitals owned by physicians.
“The Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposed severe restrictions on physician-owned hospitals, such as prohibiting the development of new physician-owned hospitals and the expansion of existing ones,” Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University and one of the coauthors of the study, said.