I toured a naturally occurring retirement community (NORC) in Queens, New York a few years ago. It was an Aging in Place initiative, partly funded by the Denver-based Daniels Fund. Fun fact: The fund was established by Bill Daniels before he died. His fortune came from basically inventing cable TV. The purpose of a NORC is to allow people in the community to age in their own homes as long as possible, rather than forced to move into assisted living ..read more

Arnold Kling:  My model of nonprofits says that they please donors without necessarily accomplishing anything. The increase in pedestrian deaths is not caused by larger vehicles. Making medical school tuition free won’t solve the shortage of primary care physicians. Why a full body MRI is not a good idea even if it’s free. Newer antibiotics are safer and more effective. So why aren’t doctors prescribing them ..read more

Nowadays more than four-in-five drugs granted accelerated approval are oncology drugs (85%). How well is it working? That depends. The program to grant patients early access to promising new drugs does just that: it is used a lot. Since it began in 1992, 290 drugs have been approved through the accelerated program. That works out to more than nine a year, on average, or nearly one a month. By any measure that accelerated access to new drugs ..read more

Why should antidepressants be switched from Rx to OTC? Because there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals. Access to mental health specialists and therapists is difficult for many people. Most therapists don’t accept insurance and psychiatrists are booked out far in advance ..read more

With the end of the covid emergency millions of Americans enrolled in Medicaid found they were no longer eligible. Medicaid eligibility fluctuates over time for many families. Medicaid is a patchwork of 50 state programs with eligibility that varies by age and income. Pandemic-era protections against disenrollment began expiring in the Spring of 2023 with Medicaid coverage coming to an end for many Americans. An important question public health advocates have is what happened to people dropped from the federal-state health program ..read more

The information in this post was derived from a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. More ..read more

Landmark 15-year transgender study: Around one-in-10 children expressed “gender non-contentedness” to varying degrees. But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they “often” or “sometimes” were discontent with their gender. Illegal immigrants are leaving hospitals with billions in unpaid hospital bills. Was your operation performed by a doctor? Or by a medical student in training? And how do you really know? Only half of all adults are married. And that’s not good, because “Marriage predicts happiness better than education, work and money.” (NYT) NEJM in the 1930s: “When ..read more

Do you know what a “walkaway death” is? Headline I wish I hadn’t seen: One of the Heritage Foundation’s telehealth policy recommendations for a 2025 GOP president stands at stark odds with policies advocated by telehealth stakeholders and included in GOP-backed telehealth aimed at cementing Medicare telehealth permanency. Heritage, of course is right. See Mandate for Leadership (2025) Pages 483 and 488. How California uses Medicaid to rip you off. It taxes providers, then gives the money back as Medicaid funding and draws federal matching money in the process. (WSJ) NYT ..read more

California had the worst job growth of any state. How Medicare pays providers:  for the fiscal year that began on October 1, the new rule for hospital inpatient care is just short of 800 pages, with three columns of text for most of the published pages. The physician fee schedule and skilled nursing facilities rules for 2024 run 1227 and 147 pages, respectively. Other things equal, 3 psychological traits (competitiveness, risk tolerance, and confidence) lead to higher incomes. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review determined that a cost-effective p ..read more

I haven’t been to the doctor in several years because it’s such a hassle. All that time I’ve had health insurance that I have not used. The reason is because my old doctor retired (as did the previous one) and it’s too big a hassle to find a new one. The Wall Street Journal wrote about what a pain seeing a doctor has become ..read more