Medical care, medical costs
Thanks to
the Affordable Care Act, something like 90% of Americans have some form of
health insurance. Great news! That means we can all afford the medical services
we need and nobody has to go broke because they get sick or are injured in a
car crash or by somebody exercising their Second Amendment rights! Err, no. Sadly
it does not mean that. In the first place, for the 50% of people who get their
insurance through employment, it ’s costing them more and more for the premiums –
by three times the rate of inflation, since 1999. With that, plus
deductibles, copays, and payment denials by in...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 2, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Name that tune!
The introduction to several psalms refers to events in 1 Samuel when David is on the run from Saul, although the content is not really specific to the tale. In Psalm 56, "The Dove on Far-off Terebinths " is thought to be the name of the tune. (Terebinths are a kind of tree.) We ' ve seen a few of these instances where an existing composition is apparently given new lyrics. Oddly, however, 1 Samuel 21, in which David goes to Gad, does not actually say that the Philistine seized him. David was apparently afraid that KingAchish would do him ill, so he pretended to be insane, whereupon Achish expelled him. But there is no dire...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 31, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Welcome to the nuthouse
Despite having his Precious Bodily Fluids depleted and polluted by the feminist succubus and the Bill Gates microchip vaccine, Travis Kelce turned in a Hall of Fame-worthy performance to lead the KC Chiefs to the Superb Owl. So, right on cue, MAGAland is in hysteria becausethe game was obviously rigged, presumably by an Italian satellite, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hugo Chavez.“Taylor Swift is an op,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing media
personality who boasts millions of followers across different social
media platforms, wrote on X. “It’s all fake. You’re being played.”“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift electio...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 30, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Reforming new drug development
So what to do about the misalignment between incentives under the current drug patenting and licensing regime, and public health? (To summarize recent posts in a pistachio shell, the pharmaceutical industry is motivated solely by profit, the most profitable drugs are not necessarily the ones that contribute the most to population health, and the prices are too high for many people to afford in any case.) It is true that if there were an effective international regime to limit pharmaceutical prices, the investment in new R&D would be severely limited. As Thomas Pogge puts it (Pharmaceutical Patents and Economic
Inequali...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: David Kvetches
We have two short psalms and one long one today. " Mahalath " in Psalm 53 is probably a kind of stringed instrument, perhaps similar to a guitar. The singer believes that all of humanity is depraved. This seems to have been written at some time of ill fortune, but the context is not specified. Psalm 54 refers to an incident in 1 Samuel 23. David was hiding from Saul in the wilderness of Ziph, when the Ziphites (presumably some Ziphites, or their representatives) went to Saul and told him where David was to be found. Saul and his army went to capture David, but they were called away to respond to a Philistine att...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Reflections on the Dumpster
Many sane people are baffled by the veneration of the Trump cultists for such a repulsive, worthless excuse for a human being. I ' m going to say what we aren ' t supposed to say. The answer is obvious: the characteristics of the Orange Shitpile that are most loathsome are exactly what they like about him. He gives not just permission, but affirmation, to the base impulses of people who aren ' t very smart and whose basic nature is selfishness, continual anger, and hatred.People who are ignorant, lack critical thinking skills, and whose minds are boxed in by prejudice and bigotry can ' t win arguments with facts and logic,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 27, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Calling out the bullshit
Conclusions and Relevance Results of this study indicated that research and development
investments did not explain the variation in list prices for the 60
drugs in this sample. Drug companies should make further data available
to support their claims that high drug prices are needed to recover
research and development investments, if they are to continue to use
this argument to justify high prices. In case you don ' t know much about statistics, this is as zero of a correlation as you will ever get. I mean no association at all, zip, zilch, nada. And I might add that the basic research to identify biol...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 26, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Bad King
Psalms 51 and 52 refer to incidents in 2 Samuel and 1 Samuel, respectively, in which David does not exactly earn his crown. As with all the psalms of David, they were written long after he was dead -- they ' re actually fan fiction, or commentaries on Samuel. Just as a reminder, Psalm 51 refers to 2 Samuel 11-12 in which David rapes a woman named Bathsheba and gets her pregnant. To try to cover it up he summons her husband Uriah, a general, back from the front, but Uriah is loyal to his troops and won ' t come, so David has him murdered. He then marries Bathsheba. That is definitely not nice. God sent Nathan to let David k...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Drug prices continued: Innovation?
Pharmaceutical manufacturers claim that they need patent protection and marketing exclusivity so they can charge high prices to recoup the costs of drug development and clinical trials. There are a few things wrong with this argument, but they add up to the general fact that the system does not serve the public interest. Drug companies care about one thing only, that is profit. And the pursuit of profit does not serve the interests of public health or social welfare.One obvious mismatch between the goal of public health and the goal of profit is that a relatively cheap drug that you can take once or for a week or so, that ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 23, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: I'll give it one like
Psalm 49 is one I can pretty much get behind. It ' s kind of Buddhist, actually. One of Jesus ' s sermons is also reminiscent -- in Matthew 6 19-21. (That whole chapter is where a lot of the good stuff in the Gospels is to be found.)19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[c] consume and where thieves break in and steal,20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust[d] consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.Psalm 50, on the other hand, is another one of those vaingloriou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 21, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Correcting more disinformation
The gap between Republican blathering and reality is unbridgeable. I ' m just going to rip off NPR here.Experts say New York is not experiencing a crime waveSo is it accurate to say New York in the grips of a crime wave?Some experts say not at all." Putting
shooting and homicide crimes into context, we ' re a much safer city than
we were 30 years ago, " says assistant professor Christopher Herrmann, acriminologist
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He ' s formerly with the NYPD
and has been studying the city ' s crime trends for years. Herrmann says
last year there were438 murders; there werenearly 2,000 t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Pharmaceutical profiteering
Another reason why we spend more on pharmaceuticals than the rest of the world ( " drugs " also means fentanyl and crank so I ' m trying to disambiguate here) is the profit motive. There are perverse incentives built into the system that encourage use of higher priced chemicals when cheaper ones would be as good or better for patients.There are some medications that people can ' t take at home. You have to go to a physician ' s office and have them infused. Medicare pays the physician a percentage of the cost of the drug, which means, obviously, that doctors make more money infusing a $10,000 drug than they would infusing ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Okay, getting back to drug prices . . .
As I noted previously, prescription drugs cost much more in the U.S. than everywhere else in the world. Yes, yes, I know, the drug companies say they need to recoup the high costs of research, development, and clinical trials, so the U.S. is subsidizing that for everyone else. I ' ll get around to why that ' s a crock, but first let ' s deal with the fact of high prices. As we learned last time, drug makers have a period of patent protection and then additional " marketing exclusivity " after their drugs are approved by the FDA. During that period, they have no competition, and they can charge as much as they think th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 18, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Religion and morality
A commenter asks about the relationship over time between religiosity, and crime and " sexual deviance. " You got it!If you will refer to my previous post on declining religiosity in America (or just take my word for it) the trend toward fewer people claiming religious affiliation began in about 1992. What a coinkydink! That ' s exactly when the crime rate began to decline. Here are property crimes (data is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics andI cribbed it from the Wikipedia article): And whaddya know, that ' s also exactly when the homicide rate started to decline! (Note that it first started to go up sharp...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Religio-nationalism
The next three psalms are songs of praise to God, but they also equate his greatness with the strength of the Jewish nation. It ' s important to keep in mind that in the ancient world, Gods pertained to particular nations or ethnic groups. The Hebrew Bible was largely compiled during the Babylonian exile, mostly from earlier material, but as Ezrah/Nehemiah and other works show, some of it was added after the return and construction of the Second Temple. I ' m not sure whether these were written before or after the exile, and therefore which incarnation of Zion they refer to. Psalm 46 seems to refer to an earthquake, but we...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
