PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO It’s supposed to end on Friday. But the Wall Street Journal says that continued extensions are the left’s best way of expanding the welfare state. One reason is that in March 2020 Congress barred states from kicking ineligible people off Medicaid rolls during the emergency in return for more federal funding. Medicaid enrollment has ballooned to…
Category: Health Reform
Medical Debts Have Many Causes; Not Always a Lack of Money
An article in Medical Economics broke down the data from a recent survey by Kaiser Health News on medical indebtedness. Why don’t patients pay their medical bills? It’s not just a lack of money. Of consumers with medical debt, about two-thirds (67%) said they did not fully pay a medical bill due to a lack of money. However, a similar proportion (68%) didn’t pay it because they expected their health plan to pay it. Meanwhile 44% didn’t fully pay their bills because they thought them inaccurate.
Monday Links
- 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
- California is going to make its own insulin.
- Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
- Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off. “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
- Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
- David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
What Difference Does Health Care Make?
Robin Hanson’s classic article comes to this conclusion:
Perhaps the most striking puzzle in health policy is the apparent lack of an aggregate empirical relation between medical care and health. Observed variations in medical care typically have an insignificant effect on average population health, even when looking at large data sets, sets larger than those which convinced most researchers of the reality of many other influences on health.