By DANIEL STONE As a doctor, I consider Secretary Xavier Becerra and his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to be allies of practitioners like me. The behemoth federal agency administers Medicare and Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration, and an army of public health workers. The Surgeon General, symbolic leader of the nation’s…
That is the questions an NBER working paper by Fleck, Heathcote, Storesletten, and Violante aims to answer. Using a variety of survey and administrative data, the authors reach the following 8 conclusions: (i) The federal tax and transfer system is progressive. (ii) State and local tax and transfer systems are close to proportional, on average….
States and the nation’s health industry were thrown into disarray after the Trump administration ordered Monday that the government freeze nearly all federal grants at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday, a sweeping directive that at least initially appeared to include funding for Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that covers more than 70 million Americans. By…
Hace apenas unos años, los niños con diabetes tipo 1 iban a la enfermería de la escuela varias veces al día para que les pincharan un dedo y ver si su nivel de azúcar en sangre era peligrosamente alto o bajo. La llegada del monitor continuo de glucosa (MCG) hizo que eso ya no fuera…
Just a few years ago, children with Type 1 diabetes reported to the school nurse several times a day to get a finger pricked to check whether their blood sugar was dangerously high or low. The introduction of the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) made that unnecessary. The small device, typically attached to the arm, has…
President Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer with no formal medical or public health expertise, as secretary of Health and Human Sciences. Two Senate committees will question Kennedy this week on how his disproven views of science and medicine qualify him to run the $1.7 trillion, 80,000-employee federal health system….
Chuanzi Yue and Marisa Miraldo argue in a recent Health Affairs Forefront piece that the answer is ‘yes’, but I am highly skeptical of their claim. Will IRA cause firms to allocate funds from marketing to R&D? One point they make is that the IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program will reduce pharmaceutical expenses on…
By EMILY JOHNSON Imagine you’re an executive at a large health system in a major metropolitan area. One morning, you wake up to a missed call and a voicemail from your PR leader. It’s urgent: one of your employees–who was also a patient and a member of the organization–has unexpectedly died by suicide. Their family…
HELENA, Mont. — As part of a proposed revamping of the state’s behavioral health system, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration is looking into moving a facility for people with developmental disabilities, beefing up renovations at the Montana State Hospital, and creating a Helena unit of that psychiatric hospital. The changes, backers say, would fill gaps…
Every year, a health care think tank called the Lown Institute ranks the 10 worst examples of “profiteering and dysfunction” in health care and “honors” the winners. The “Shkreli Awards” are a kind of Oscars for the most outrageous examples of greed, fraud, and general brokenness in American health care. The awards are named after…