Healthcare is unsustainable and everyone is afraid to do anything about it.
ER-100, the name of a treatment created by Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup, has won FDA approval to proceed with the 1st targeted attempt at age reversal in humans. The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming” that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech. The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off.
Meanwhile, Medicaid spending has jumped 25% in California in 2 years and doubled since 2019. This year it will reach almost $200 billion, in part to cover 1.6 million illegal immigrants at a cost of almost $10 billion.
Meanwhile, in NYC, the local nursing union was striking local hospitals. The walked out 3 years ago and came away with average pay hikes of 6% annually plus other big gains. The economic imbecile zohran kwame mamdani seems to have emboldened them further. mamdani joined the nurses on their picket lines, meaning that he was effectively negotiating against taxpayers. The nurses are striking non-profit private hospitals, but whatever contract they reach will apply to the city’s frequently terrible public hospitals too. They demanded 10% annual wage hikes, plus other salary, benefits, and work rules changes. The average nurse’s salary and benefits would have reached $272,000 per year by the end of the proposed new contract in 2029 — an increase of $110,000 from current levels. The demands would have raised costs for NY hospitals, which are already extraordinarily expensive, by several billion dollars a year. Ironically, given spiraling health-care costs, much of that extra money would likely go to pay for health insurance, which BObamaCare promised wouldn't happen. And you believed a neo-liberal!
This is what happens when an entire sector of the economy breaks down and everyone working inside it views it as little more than a honeypot to be abused with impunity. The difference between medicine and most other parts of the economy, of course, is that in medicine the customers don’t (directly) pay, so they don’t have much say in the costs. But Trump seems at least to be beginning to recognize that it can no longer give insurers, hospitals, and drug companies a blank check.
Meanwhile, Medicaid spending has jumped 25% in California in 2 years and doubled since 2019. This year it will reach almost $200 billion, in part to cover 1.6 million illegal immigrants at a cost of almost $10 billion.
Meanwhile, in NYC, the local nursing union was striking local hospitals. The walked out 3 years ago and came away with average pay hikes of 6% annually plus other big gains. The economic imbecile zohran kwame mamdani seems to have emboldened them further. mamdani joined the nurses on their picket lines, meaning that he was effectively negotiating against taxpayers. The nurses are striking non-profit private hospitals, but whatever contract they reach will apply to the city’s frequently terrible public hospitals too. They demanded 10% annual wage hikes, plus other salary, benefits, and work rules changes. The average nurse’s salary and benefits would have reached $272,000 per year by the end of the proposed new contract in 2029 — an increase of $110,000 from current levels. The demands would have raised costs for NY hospitals, which are already extraordinarily expensive, by several billion dollars a year. Ironically, given spiraling health-care costs, much of that extra money would likely go to pay for health insurance, which BObamaCare promised wouldn't happen. And you believed a neo-liberal!
This is what happens when an entire sector of the economy breaks down and everyone working inside it views it as little more than a honeypot to be abused with impunity. The difference between medicine and most other parts of the economy, of course, is that in medicine the customers don’t (directly) pay, so they don’t have much say in the costs. But Trump seems at least to be beginning to recognize that it can no longer give insurers, hospitals, and drug companies a blank check.
Of course the companies will tell the world that Trump is killing old people by slashing Medicare. (Only in the world of neo-liberal budgeting does keeping spending flat — or even raising it less than predicted — count as “slashing.”) In general, left-wing media, like the ny times and CNN bs have simply refused to consider whether the healthcare system’s overall costs are sustainable. No one can say with a straight face that the US does not spend enough money on healthcare, that maybe the problem is on the cost side, on how quickly insurance premiums have spiraled since left-wing/democrats passed BObamaCare, much less ask the question of whether BObamaCare might have driven those costs up.
A $5 trillion healthcare system may be more fragile in direct proportion to more government involvement.
A $5 trillion healthcare system may be more fragile in direct proportion to more government involvement.
neo-liberals, until they run out of money at the state and federal level, are happy to throw more money into the current system, using Medicaid and BObamaCare subsidies to expand insurance coverage. They’ll blame insurance and drug company profiteering (which are real but a small part of the system’s overall crisis) for any problems.
The current system is unsustainable and all its players, including Big Pharma and device manufacturers, insurance and hospital companies, health-care unions, public health bureaucracies, and “medical entrepreneurs” spend their lives gaming reimbursement rules.
The consensus on healthcare is that Americans dislike the current system but will not tolerate radical changes to it.
The current system is unsustainable and all its players, including Big Pharma and device manufacturers, insurance and hospital companies, health-care unions, public health bureaucracies, and “medical entrepreneurs” spend their lives gaming reimbursement rules.
The consensus on healthcare is that Americans dislike the current system but will not tolerate radical changes to it.
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The good news is that President Trump has a plan to fix health care, one of the many reasons why people voted for him. For a start, he is going to lower all drug prices by at least a few hundred percent.