Mozi is a splendid idea for making serendipitous encounters happen. On the other hand, can you truly call these encounters serendipitous if they needed an app? (ᔥMatthew Haughey)
A few sentences to make your blood boiling in this whopper from Noah Smith:
It’s mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.
[…] the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much.
And to top it off:
Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on.
Using “healthcare provider” to mean pharmaceutical companies is at best careless when the article you are writing is directly tied to a murder of a health insurance executive. But what really upsets me is that he is right: physicians, nurses, etc. have allowed themselves to be tied to these behemoths for the promise of what? A steadier paycheck that is less — for the time spent in school and at work — than what a mid-career IT professional earns? Sad. (↬Tyler Cowen)
As Nassim Taleb likes to say, no rumor is true until officially denied. Godspeed.
On my way back from #ASH24 I’ll go back through the abstract book and check out how many cell therapy oral presentations were given by investigators from China. This is the first meeting I’ve attended since 2019 and the difference is striking. Kudos!
The article is titled I Say Forbidden Things About Sports, and he does! Here are the six actual benefits:
Instead, notes Gioia, the young athletes are taught that:
How very true. To take NBA, an American sport with which I am the most familiar, you can see it in the large swings in score when the losing team snaps and realizes they can’t win the game and therefore they don’t even try.
Do read the whole thing.
🏀 Speaking of sports, how about them Wizards? Of course it happened while we were away and couldn’t enjoy the rare win, but it is also good since it was against the Nuggets and the family is split around which team we would have supported. So it goes…
Seeing those PET scans after CAR-T 5–10 years ago was transformative but it has now become superfluous. Yes, yes, that was a nice anecdote, can I now please see some data? #ASH24
100% of patients developed grade ≥3 neutropenia. “The safety profile was mild” #ASH24
PCA maps are the new PET scan, only with zero clinical relevancy instead of at least some. Much more subjective, too! #ASH24
United Airlines IAD→SAN flight is full, the person in front of me is talking about sickle cell disease, and I know a good chunk of people on board. I should also be looking at the #ASH24 program instead of writing this but oh well.