- Scott Atlas reviews our experience with Covid: mortality rates, natural immunity, vaccines, lockdowns, and more.
- Can Chat GPT replace doctors?
- More than 8 million Americans with diabetes rely on insulin; yet surveys find that one in six people who use insulin say they ration the drug because of the cost.
- Elizabeth Warren report finds that medigap insurers do what every other insurer does: reward agents for sales of its policies. Of course, seniors in Medicare Advantage plans don’t need medigap policies.
- Eli Lilly’s announcement that it will cap at $35 a month what patients pay out of their own pockets for the company’s insulin has two problems: (1) the company already had such a policy in place, and (2) the company says the cap will not have much, if any, effect on what many people are actually paying.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Free Market Competition Is the Way to Lower the Cost of Insulin and Other Drugs
In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”
That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.
Thursday Links
- Arnold Kling gives an (admittedly Jewish) view of why Christianity is unravelling.
- Claim: social media is a major cause of depression – especially in teen girls.
- Turns out its worse if the girls are politically liberal.
- There are 34 million Health Savings Accounts, holding almost $100 billion.
- Biden accuses MAGA Republicans of wanting to cut health care spending. This is after the Democrats’ IRA bill cut $307 billion out of Medicare (CBO report, p, 72) and the administration plans future large cuts in Medicare Advantage.
Would You See an AI Doctor?
The term artificial intelligence (AI) has been in use for many years. Indeed, it includes many names, such as AI, neural networks, machine learning and a few other buzzwords. The preceding linked article from IBM tries to explain the meaning of all these terms. A few years ago, IBM made headlines as the developer of Watson, which famously competed on the game show Jeopardy, beating Ken Jennings. There is a new AI interface on the Internet that anyone can try out called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language-based AI chatbot that can do many things humans can do, including correcting computer code, writing college entrance essays and a host of other things.