Why Republicans think that insurance should be tied to employment — and that it’s not essential to have at all. “The idea of requiring Medicaid enrollees to work barely registered eight years ago, the last time Republicans debated deep health care cuts as part of their effort to repeal Obamacare. They failed to pass a law that time. This time they were successful. That’s in part because Republicans have put more stock in an idea that has long been a part of the American conversation about health insurance: that it is a benefit one earns by working. Work requirements have … Read More
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It’s long been obvious why cigarettes are bad. The risks of alternatives like Zyn and Juul are much hazier. “it’s easier than ever to get a nicotine buzz without any tobacco at all: Just puff on a vape or pop a tiny nicotine pouch between your teeth and upper lip. These cigarette alternatives have been around for a while, but only recently have they gone fully mainstream. In January, the FDA officially sanctioned the sale of Zyn, among the most recognizable nicotine-pouch brands. In the past three months alone, Philip Morris International, which makes Zyn, shipped 190 million cans of … Read More
More than a thousand dentists have set up shop in Los Algodones. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care. “According to Roberto Díaz and Paula Hahn, who run a website about medical tourism called Border CRxing, Los Algodones now has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred. It’s known as Molar City. [..] technology has its downsides. The more advanced the imaging system, the more expensive the visit, and the more problems it can find with your teeth. Last year, at a routine … Read More
Excerpt – The global total fertility rate has more than halved since 1950, with those of most countries already below replacement level. The population pyramid is increasingly inverted, not just in the wealthiest Western nations but also in most places outside Africa. [..] If birthrates do not recover — and at present, they show no real signs of doing so — eventually we will be forced to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history up until recently: Older people will be cared for privately, typically by their children and grandchildren, and those without families will have to rely … Read More
“Should employers offer financial incentives for employees who monitor and report “ideal health behaviors”? Should employers offer financial incentives for employees who meet BMI requirements? In this commentary, I take issue with these practices as described in the case above, arguing that labeling behaviors that influence a person’s weight in normative terms contributes to a phenomenon called healthism, an ideology that emphasizes one’s personal responsibility for one’s own health. Engaging in practices that support healthism is morally wrong, because healthism ignores social factors that constrain individuals’ choices and reinforces oppressive social hierarchies. Thus, we ought not to label behaviors influencing a person’s … Read More
“Recent research has revealed substantial variability in hospital charity care and other financial assistance (FA) policies. This lack of standardization makes it much more difficult for patients and anyone assisting them (including clinicians) to ascertain their likely eligibility for free or discounted care. [..] Conventionally, nonprofit hospitals have covered essentially the full range of “medically necessary” services that health insurers typically cover. But we have noticed a troubling development: some hospitals now offer assistance only if care is urgently needed, thereby excluding a broad range of necessary care. Hospitals offer free and discounted care in several ways, as outlined in … Read More
How the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is dismantling the agency. Excerpt – More and more, people seemed to clamor for things that were unproven, to question things that were and to express not only mistrust but outright hostility toward the doctors, scientists and civil servants trying to separate one from the other. That hostility was being nourished by exactly the kind of mis- and disinformation Kennedy was espousing. It was easy to paint the F.D.A. as a supervillain (an aggressive suppressor of sunlight, vitamins and exercise, to borrow Kennedy’s language), in part because the truth was so … Read More
A disease doesn’t have to be real to cause worldwide damage “While I am deeply concerned about the long-term existential threat of AI and synthetic biology to create new or modified pathogens, my extensive experience detecting and controlling outbreaks around the world makes me fear a more immediate threat: a rogue actor using existing AI tools to simulate a bioterrorism attack that would destabilize a region or the world. [..] Freely available AI tools now permit people to create “deepfakes” that are almost impossible for a person to differentiate from reality without special tools. It’s not simply a question of whether … Read More
“The largest health care companies in the US are no longer just health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), physician practices, home health agencies, hospices, data warehouses, data analytics firms, or hospitals. They are increasingly all of the above. A small number of unavoidable health care intermediaries are incorporating these services into essential platforms that simultaneously serve as payers, providers, and everything in between. While these companies claim to rationalize health care and realize the promise of coordinated, integrated care, the reality may be quite different. The creation of “big health care” platforms risks worsening the already serious problem of monopoly … Read More
STAT reviewed dozens of studies, interviewed chronic disease experts, and landed on three focus areas for RFK Jr. to boost health Excerpt – Among Kennedy’s primary focuses so far has been convincing food companies to remove chemical additives and artificial dyes: an admirable goal, many nutrition experts say, but not the kind of change that would substantially improve people’s health when compared to other needed reforms. He will need to go bigger, they told STAT. However, some researchers say Kennedy is right to keep his eyes on the environment Americans inhabit — the products in their supermarkets, the toxins in … Read More