Every dollar Medicare spent on monitoring generates $24–29 in government savings, mainly from the deterrence of medically unnecessary future care. Monitoring increases upfront investments in technology to assess the necessity of care.

Physicians’ annual earnings average $350,000 and comprise 8.6% of national healthcare spending. Government policy has a major impact on earnings: 25% of incremental Medicare spending on physician care goes to physicians personally, and physicians earn 6% of public money spent on insurance expansions.

The pervasiveness of employer-provided healthcare in the United States contributes to labor market inequality; under an alternative scenario where healthcare is funded by a payroll tax on firms, the college-wage premium would be 11% lower. If healthcare costs had grown at the rate of other countries, inequality would have grown less as well.

Larger regions are more efficient at producing medical services. This leaves policymakers with a trade-off between concentrating medical care production in more efficient large regions and promoting healthcare access in less efficient small regions. Production and travel subsidies can both increase access to healthcare but impact patients, providers, and neighboring regions differently.

Disclosures of financial ties between drug companies and researchers in medical journals negatively affect readers’ citation behavior, consistent with the hypothesis that other researchers discount articles with disclosed conflicts.

Beneficiaries of Medicare Part D who face restrictions on a drug reduce their use by 26.8%, reducing drug spending by $96 per beneficiary-year, while only generating about $10 in paperwork costs.

Providing a basic bundle of publicly funded services, while allowing individuals to purchase additional coverage, could expand US health coverage in a financially sustainable way that maintained incentives for innovation.

Authoritarian regimes, seemingly well-equipped to implement restrictive measures, are ill-suited to deal with public health challenges; further, repression complements propaganda as more arrests allow to increase the extent of information manipulation.