- Open source programming is making AI impossible to regulate.
- After raising $90 million, Black Lives Matter is on the verge of bankruptcy. Question: Do any of the corporations that contributed really care?
- Zeke Emanuel megatrend prediction number 1: We will see a merging of insurers and providers.
- Zeke Emanuel megatrend prediction number 2: We will see an uprooting of the payment system in Medicare Advantage – the one place where prediction number 1 is actually occurring.
- Between 1997 and 2011, 85% of the increase in real per capita Medicare spending was on newly created procedure codes marking additional medical services. There is no fiscal restraint on these spending increases.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Smartphones are Creating a Public Health Emergency
I read a lot. If I’m away from my computer I read on my iPhone. My wife sometimes complains when I’m paying too much attention to my phone and not enough to what she’s saying. Come to find out that is very common. A couples therapist with 25-years of experience reports that the biggest new cause of friction in relationships is the smart phone.
Wednesday Links
- The debt deal may actually weaken work requirements. That’s because the bill’s new exemptions (for homeless people, veterans, and young adults who grew up in foster care) remove more people from existing work mandates than the number of people the bill adds.
- In 2021, 42 million adults in the United States sought mental-health care of one form or another. But does therapy really work? The evidence is mixed. (NYT)
- The Biden administration funds a grant to a project that discovers the GOP, Fox News, the Heritage Foundations, etc. are the foundation of Nazi, white supremacist and other hate groups.
- “We find that a 1-year reduction in effective patent length reduces the number of new drugs brought to market from 46 to 39 per year (a 16% decline), decreasing in social welfare by $9.0 trillion between 2021 and 2050. Consumers incur 75.8% ($6.8 trillion) of the reduction in social welfare.”
Just Say “No!” to Hospital Bailouts
More health care dollars are spent in hospitals than any other health care sector. Nearly one-third (31%) of the $4.255 trillion in health care expenditures are spent on hospital care. Physician care is 14.9%, while drugs are 8.9%. Thirty years ago, presidential candidate Ross Perot described a “giant sucking sound” due to jobs being sucked abroad by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nowadays the giant sucking sound is the sound of workers’ and taxpayers’ income being sucked into hospitals due to price gouging and high hospital prices.