Tag Archives: Healthcare

Money from Sick People Part IV: Paying a Premium for Drug Pricing Irregularity — 46brooklyn Research Starting with the Q1 2023 Drug Pricing file (all of this information was knowable before the 2024 Medicare plan bid process was completed). Within the files are the five insulin products we identified as taking large price decreases. 46 Brooklyn identifies each of the specific drug products (i.e. dosage form and strength) at the NDC-level, the...

I copied the two paragraphs below (actually I took one and split it) from Matt Stoller’s Big News Letter. Matt is talking about the same issues I have been talking about for years. The Pharmaceutical Industry and their rip off pricing. It is a good read if you wonder over there. The YouTube is also from his site. I can not lay claim to posting such before. Doctor Glaucomflecken makes a valid point. United Healthcare Group is one of the top PBMs....

As America ages, dementia is becoming a bigger and bigger healthcare burden. Medicare won’t pay for long-term nursing home care. Dementia will be a growing drag on the US economy at least until the baby boomer die off.Shingles is caused by herpes virus, a neurotrophic virus. For many people who had chicken pox as a child, the virus hid out in their ganglia, emerging decades later as a painful rash. There’s a vaccine for shingles now that is protective...

Been writing on Rural and Inner-city hospitals and the lack of funding for them, the buying up of the same by larger entities, and the abuse of the 340B program by the larger hospital. Once the larger hospital buys the inner-city hospital, there is a tendency to cut services and also abuse the 340B program. Rural hospitals are less funded than their city cousins. Programs such as Medicaid and Medicare pay less than their smaller margins than what...

2020 Census: 1 in 6 People in the United States Were 65 and Over, MAY 2023 Added a chart from the Census Bureau to emphasize the point of an aging population. There are a whole lot of us who are just a few years behind Joe Biden, and society isn’t ready for it. What happens when the young-old get old-old by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront I was thinking about getting old this weekend, and not just because of Joe Biden. I was at a...

I had presented Part I and Part II a while back. Part III was difficult to present in a piece-meal way so for now I have set it aside. What is interesting about Part IV is I can beak it apart into segments, still maintain the flow of informatio, and present it in a logical manner. Bear with me. By the time we get to the end, I believe you will be able to piece this together too. In Part IV . . . What Antonio is doing in Part IV is laying the...

We live in a mixed community. I think we are the oldest couple in the area. We did not want to go to an older adult-type of setting. This community is bad enough with its HOA. On one side we have a young couple with a baby. They come to our house with their baby to enjoy dinner. Relaxing in our family room allows the baby to move around and her coming to me to sit in my lap . . . “up, up in her limited English.” So up she comes to my lap. She...

It has been a while since I have commented on anything ACA related. This popped up in my in-box. I follow Andrew Sprung for the technical side of it. xpostfactoid’s Andrew and Charles Gaba at ACASignups are my go-to people on ACA healthcare and healthcare. To answer this question . . . how can it be half of all enrollees are eligible for free benchmark Silver ACA Coverage? One only has to look as far as joe Biden’s March 2021 American Rescue Plan...

One motivation to getting my genome sequenced was to see whether I had known risk alleles for dementia (spoiler alert: I don’t). My dad was diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia a few years before he died. His brain biopsy after death returned a diagnosis of Alzheimers. He might have had both.One of the known risk alleles is ApoE4. Homozygosity for ApoE4 is a strong predictor of Alzheimers by the eighth decade. I knew I wasn’t homozygous for...

Several years ago, I got my genome sequenced and obtained my variant call files, the tabulation of all differences between my gene sequences and the annotated human genome. Although my primary care physician was aware, I didn’t require his intermediation to obtain or interpret my genomics data. How I might react to adverse information was up to me. I’ve referred to my variant spreadsheet many times since then, whenever I’ve read about a new variant...