Tag Archives: Healthcare

Janet Colbert of Stop The Organized Pill Pushers Blog: “The death rate from Opioids continues to escalate year over year due to Florida ignoring the opiate epidemic for so long. Since STOPPNow (Stop The Organized Pill Pushers) started posting, the death rate went from 7/day in Florida. to 14/day. To keep the pressure on the legislature, I (Janet Colbert) will keep the Stoppnow.com site updated when we have bills that will need support to become law.”...

How Pharma Influences Legislation They Do Not Like From 2006 to 2015, pharmaceutical companies spent $880 million in lobbying state and federal legislatures and contributing to campaigns to prevent laws restricting Opioid prescriptions. Their lobbying expenditures has outstripped those advocating for greater controls on prescriptions by 200 times giving them greater influence at the state level. In 2015, 227 million prescriptions were written for opioids...

The Wall St. Journal quoted Peter Thiel’s business plans. It is mostly behind a paywall. By Peter Thiel          Sept. 12, 2014 11:25 a.m. ET What valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value isn’t enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create. New Republic points us to the politics of Democrats...

National Health Spending at $3.5 Trillion in 2017, CMS Says: CMS is reporting healthcare spending was $3.5 trillion in 2017. National healthcare spending grew by 4.6%, up 3 tenths of 1% from 2016. The increase was blamed on increased spending for Medicare and higher premiums for healthcare insurance. The increase in healthcare premiums can be partially attributed to Republicans blocking the Risk Corridor – Reissuances Programs which eliminated competition...

I have been writing on healthcare for a while now and started to look at various topics with regard to pharmaceuticals. In my researching other topics, I found this particular correspondence to the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Illuminating, if one might call it such? “A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction” The NEJM published 1980 letter: Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics Recently, we examined our current files to...

Lest we forget: David Dayen’s Weekly Newsletter Politico notes today that the 90-day emergency declared actually ends in a couple weeks, and we’re in essentially the same place that we were before the declaration. Trump has not formally proposed any new resources or spending, typically the starting point for any emergency response. He promised to roll out a “really tough, really big, really great” advertising campaign to spread awareness about...

I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about PPACA (aka, Obamacare) and its effects. It hasn’t been something that has interested me a great deal until the last week or so, so I am approaching this from a position of ignorance. But I have been reading through as much material as I can find. Basically, I think the biggest factor in favor of PPACA is the big reduction in the number of uninsured. 14.7% of Americans were uninsured in 2008, the last year before...

I don’t follow healthcare as much as others at this blog. I started playing around with some graphs at FRED and got a bit confused. I don’t mind being confused, but I like to clear up that confusion eventually. So perhaps someone can tell me what’s going on. First, this graph of healthcare expenditures / GDP which seems to indicate that Obamacare bent the cost curve: (click to embiggenize) But looking at the annual change in healthcare expenditures /...

From Employer Coverage to Single Payer Health Insurance This holiday season I’ve heard several tales of woe from working class acquaintances, mostly self-employed, about Obamacare: how they are just above the subsidy cutoff and would rather pay the fine than buy expensive individual policies, or how they are just below and can’t afford to put in more hours per week. I can understand why there is a lot of disappointment with the Democrats. So what about...

“The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, ending Obama-era regulations that prohibited Internet providers from blocking or slowing web content. Whereas all Internet traffic previously shared same ‘lane,’ it can now be split among different lanes with different speeds. Those differing speeds could hurt telemedicine since it requires a ‘pretty robust connection,’ said Mei Kwong, interim executive director and policy advisor for the Center...