Four P.E.I. doctors paid more than $1 million in 2017 | Local | News | The Guardian

Four P.E.I. doctors paid more than $1 million in 2017 | Local | News | The Guardian:



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Pharmaceutical corporations need to stop free-riding on publicly-funded research | TheHill

Pharmaceutical corporations need to stop free-riding on publicly-funded research | TheHill: "The White House’s report suggests that it costs an estimated $2.6 billion to develop a new drug today, though they’re basing this on a single, non-transparent pharmaceutical industry-supported study with problematic methodology.

In reality, companies receive substantial publicly-funded support from the government. A recent study found that all 210 drugs approved in the U.S. between 2010 and 2016 benefitted from publicly-funded research, either directly or indirectly.

Taxpayers contribute through public university research, grants, subsidies, and other incentives. This means people are often paying twice for their medicines: through their tax dollars and at the pharmacy.

At Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), we see each and every day the human suffering caused in the places we work and many countries outside the U.S. by treatments being rationed or people being denied essential medical care due to high drug and vaccines prices."



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Why conservatives are so obsessed with guns.

Why conservatives are so obsessed with guns.:



"A more workable psychological explanation begins by noting that psychologists have found consistent differences between conservatives and liberals in personality traits, attitudes, and moral stances. To summarize some of the research findings, conservatives tend to be more likely than liberals to accept or even embrace authority that is perceived to be legitimate. Conservatives tend to be more moralistic and more conventional than liberals. They tend to have a stronger need for order and control and stability and a greater dislike of change.

"Conservatives also tend to value equality less than liberals. They have less empathy and are more likely to see human nature as bad. Compared with liberals, their moral sense is less centered on fairness and kindness and more on loyalty, deference to authority, and moral and sexual purity. Conservatives also show a greater tendency than liberals toward dichotomous thinking and have a stronger need for certainty and cognitive consistency. (“I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush famously told Joe Biden. )

"The differences are not universal, of course, and there is nothing intrinsically bad or intrinsically good in the characteristics typical of either camp. But conservatives tend to lean one way, liberals the other.

" And some of these differences appear to be directly expressed in divergent beliefs relevant to the gun control debate. For example...

"...But it is hard for conservatives to accept these arguments. The interaction between characteristic conservative personality patterns and universally shared patterns of cognitionleads to conservatives being disproportionately skeptical of evidence provided by “experts” and scholarly studies. So conservatives turn to other means to soothe their anxiety. Some project their own anger onto others, fantasizing that people of color, immigrants, and feminists are the cause of their own inner torments. Anger, if nothing else, makes them feel bigger and more powerful."



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Health Care’s Price Conundrum | The New Yorker

Health Care’s Price Conundrum | The New Yorker:



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Some Americans spend billions to get teeth whiter. Some wait in line to get them pulled. | The Washington Post

Some Americans spend billions to get teeth whiter. Some wait in line to get them pulled. | The Washington Post:

As the distance between rich and poor grows in the United States, few consequences are so overlooked as the humiliating divide in dental care. High-end cosmetic dentistry is soaring, and better-off Americans spend well over $1 billion each year just to make their teeth a few shades whiter.

Millions of others rely on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms to treat painful and neglected teeth. Unable to afford expensive root canals and crowns, many simply have them pulled. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 do not have a single real tooth left.

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Long Waits for Doctors’ Appointments Have Become the Norm - The New York Times

Long Waits for Doctors’ Appointments Have Become the Norm - The New York Times: "The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care, compared wait times in the United States to those in 10 other countries last year. “We were smug and we had the impression that the United States had no wait times — but it turns out that’s not true,” said Robin Osborn, a researcher for the foundation. “It’s the primary care where we’re really behind, with many people waiting six days or more” to get an appointment when they were “sick or needed care.”

The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent). When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.

So it turns out that America has its own waiting problem. But we tend to wait for different types of medical interventions. And that is mainly a result of payment incentives, experts say."



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Uwe E. Reinhardt: U.S. Health Care Prices Are the Elephant in the Room - The New York Times

Uwe E. Reinhardt: U.S. Health Care Prices Are the Elephant in the Room - The New York Times:

In most other countries, prices for health care goods and services are not negotiated between individual health insurers and individual physicians, hospitals or drug companies, as they are in the private insurance sector in United States.

Instead prices there either are set by government or negotiated between associations of insurers and providers of care, on a regional, state or national basis. The single prices for other countries shown in the chart therefore can be taken representative of prices actually paid there.

By contrast, as can be seen in the charts, in the United States there is quite a range of prices for the identical good or service.

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