Health

For a couple of years now we've highlighted various data points suggesting that Obamacare was, and continues to be, in an inescapable death spiral that will end in a spectacular collapse of healthcare exchanges around the country.  While there are a number of reasons that Obamacare was doomed from the start, it basically all boils down to the original failed logic that millions of young, healthy Americans would gladly pay out the nose for a product they didn't want and knew they would never use all to fulfill a civic obligation to subsidize the healthcare costs of their older and/or less fo

Authored by Gilbert Berdine via The Mises Institute,

Enter “outrageous drug prices” into Google and you will receive plenty of examples. As reported here, Marathon Pharmaceuticals planned to charge $89,000 per year for its Emflaza brand of the corticosteroid deflazacort. Deflazacort was introduced in 1969 and is available outside the U.S. for less than $2 per tablet. US patients with muscular dystrophy have been obtaining the drug for around $1,500 per year from foreign sources.

The opioid epidemic isn’t the only public-health crisis plaguing the US.

Americans are hitting the bottle harder than ever, according to a new study published by JAMA Psychiatry, posing new challenges for the US’s strained health-care system as local hospitals and first responders struggle with the spike in substance-abuse related maladies, including overdoses and alcohol poisoning that warrant urgent care.

With Obamacare firmly in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers, the debate around U.S. healthcare is at a fever pitch.

While there is no shortage of opinions on the best route forward, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins points out that the timeliness of the debate also gives us an interesting chance to dive into some of the numbers around healthcare – namely how people even get coverage in the first place.

HOW AMERICANS GET HEALTHCARE

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released its latest batch of data seeking to measure the quality of health care in each of its member states.

The rankings show that although the US spends more per capita on health care than any of the 34 other OECD member states, its average life expectancy of 78.8 years ranks is among the lowest found in the group, according to a Bloomberg analysis.