Pharmaceutical Costs and Comparing Life Expectancy

https://www.city-journal.org/price-controls-on-pharmaceuticals

American teenagers and young adults are also more likely to die for reasons unrelated to medical care. About half of the overall longevity gap between the U.S. and other developed countries stems from its higher mortality rate below age 50, which is partly due to infant mortality but mainly to the much higher rates of homicides, fatal motor-vehicle accidents (Americans drive much more than Europeans do), and other injuries—notably, drug overdoses. In middle age and beyond, one of the chief causes of the longevity gap is the U.S. rate of obesity, which is nine times higher than Japan’s and about double the rate of Europe. When a National Academy of Sciences panel in 2011 analyzed the longevity of Americans above age 50, it concluded that obesity accounts for 20 percent to 35 percent, and possibly more than half, of the gap with other affluent countries.

An even bigger factor is smoking, which was much more common through the 1980s among Americans, especially women. Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who was one of the editors of the National Academy report, estimated that smoking accounted for 41 percent of the life-expectancy gap among men and 78 percent of the gap among women. He found that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings among developed countries.

Considering all these disproportionate killers in the United States—smoking, obesity, fatal injuries, and the rest—why isn’t the life-expectancy gap even larger? Because Americans receive better treatment, particularly for cardiovascular disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death after 45. While heart disease is more prevalent in the United States than in other developed countries (no surprise, considering all the overweight Americans with a history of smoking), people with high cholesterol and hypertension are more likely to receive treatment for their condition in the U.S. than in other countries.

Global Warming BS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/06/opinion_why_the_nyts_maple_syrup_story_tastes_funny.html  

How did the New York Times get things so wrong? Is it carelessness? Or is there an ideological agenda at play, one that requires the reporting and writing to lead to a preestablished conclusion? On Twitter, the NYT reporter calls herself Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis. That is no doubt a gesture at self-aware humor. But it also suggests that her reporting is skewed: If you see gloom as your beat, by definition you ignore information that doesn’t advance the narrative of impending doom. And then there is the larger institutional bias. Pierre-Louis is officially a "climate reporter" for the Times; she leads NYT-branded "student journeys" to places such as Iceland (cost: $8,190 per high-schooler for 15 days) to teach the risks of a warming planet. In other words, the Times has a business built in part around Pierre-Louis that depends on her being a warning voice on warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change do a lot of fretting over what may happen 50 to 100 years from now. Fair enough — or at least it would be if those delivering the warnings were in more of a habit of playing it straight. It would be much easier to credit their predictions of future catastrophes if they were more honest about what is actually, observably, happening right now.

Medicaid Crowding Out State Education Spending

https://www.educationnext.org/higher-ed-lower-spending-as-states-cut-back-where-has-money-gone/#

There has been a gradual decline in public financial support of higher education over the past 30 years. The average state spends $2,337 less today per full-time-equivalent college student than in 1987. This divestment has been passed on to students partly in the form of higher tuition and partly through reduced spending, both of which have been shown to negatively impact students. While the public discussion around college usually focuses on the price paid by students, recent work by economists David Deming and Chris Walters suggests that declines in the amount colleges and universities spend may have a larger impact on student outcomes.

This essay asks a simple question: where did the money go? Reduced spending on higher education must go somewhere¸ and the goal of my analysis is to produce the best possible estimates of where the spending went, the degree to which changes in different categories of spending explain changes in higher-education spending per student.

In reality, there are 50 different answers to this question, but in the aggregate, states have shifted most of their former investment toward public-welfare programs, particularly Medicaid. This finding highlights the struggle state legislatures face to balance the immediate needs of today against investments in the future. Most important, it illustrates that constraining the rise of health-care costs is critical not just for those who care about health-care reform but for the public-higher-education landscape as well.