Convert it into Euros. Or Yen. Or Yuan.

I am forced into an extremely limited diet to avoid provoking my body any more than I have to. And, notably, one of the first reactions used to be something not tasting as good as it used to (or in one case tasting worse than it had.) It doesn't always happen but when it does it's a near 100% accurate test--the only time it ever fooled me the actual culprit turned out to be something my wife put on her face.

I saw what happened to my mother (very similar path, but started much later in life), I already knew how to isolate what was giving me trouble before it ever happened. Most people don't, though, especially when dealing with things where it isn't high on the ingredients list (or, sometimes, not at all--they are strong about requiring manufacturers to list what they put in, but there is no such requirement about noting what they fail to take out from a natural source. Not to mention being allowed to specify that most evil of ingredients "artificial flavors". The second most evil being "natural flavors.")

It "costs" much less--because in reality we end up footing the R&D bill. The drug companies tolerate sales to the UHC countries so long as it's above their marginal cost. If US customers were also paying $31 for that Sofosbuvir there's no way the company would recoup costs and they would not develop it.

Fixing this will cause big shakeups in the universal coverage systems and thus big political shakeups. It should be done, but gradually.

I will also say the comparison is false--my wife is on Atorvastatin, it's even less than what you are quoting for Australia. You're comparing the brand name with the generic.

As with so many situations where you have unreasonable corporate behavior the problem is the economics favors making wrong decisions. Thus there will be little attempt to prevent those wrong decisions. The only real fix is to make wrong decisions cost--look at airlines. You end up with more passengers that seats, you pay. It went a long way towards addressing the problem. (But it should have been higher and it should be indexed to inflation.)

But note the insurance is not always the bad guy. Patients want things that aren't medically warranted, especially when the right answer is "do nothing". And doctors like to run up the bill.

And note this article is focusing on things other than medical decisions--but describing a system that could only be a problem if they are making wrong medical decisions. How they decide what claims to examine is irrelevant, what matters is if they are making wrong medical decisions. It very much needs to be considered the practice of medicine and a denial should only come from someone of at least the same specialization as the doctor making the request. And "not medically necessary" should require an evaluation of why, you don't get to just say "no".

Both (Google/Apple) need a much higher level of certification for anything to be allowed to be prompted to install. Either you're already big (and can easily afford to pay for some human time to verify), or you're a manufacturer selling something that has an associated app (again, which implies you're reasonably big and can afford to pay for verification.)

You're neither? Get lost. Somebody types in the name of the app, fine, but the user must find it.

But China saw it was probably airborne and reacted as if it were. We had the same data, we could reach the same conclusions, but we didn't want to.

I do recall worry about right wing things which were "outdoor"--but would have a lot of indoor spillover. Things like that motorcycle thing--the motorcycle part was outdoors but you would have a lot of people going to bars and the like in the evening. The right always tried to portray it as political, but only by oversimplification.

Big gatherings *outdoors*: low risk.

Church is pretty dangerous, a protest is reasonably safe.

Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake.

And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.

1) No vaccine is 100% effective.

2) Against something that mutates quickly the vaccine will always be behind. Thus the new variants win out. (The same thing would happen in the absence of vaccines, but it would take longer.)

The idea that it could actually be stamped out was very wishful thinking. But the vaccine does have a big benefit in reducing death.

And look at Twitter--much less reliable.