Is Medicare Running Out of Money?
Is Medicare Running Out of Money?
A few weeks ago we discussed the implications the discussion around the debt ceiling could have on Medicare and Medicaid. This week, it seems there is another problem insurers who provide such options will have to worry about: the Medicare trust fund running out of money.
According to some estimates, the fund could go bankrupt as soon as 2028, which is also an election year. Of course, that means it will be a hotly contended topic during that election.
In the federal government, House GOP members have been carefully choosing their words and only passing warnings while claiming to be ready to defend these programs. Meanwhile the Biden administration has proposed cutting back on payments to insurers for the administration of private medicare plans and cutting back on the payments for medicare advantage plans.
Some of y’all who have been reading our work for a long time might remember our first article on Kaiser’s medicare advantage plan in August of 2021.
Even then, these plans were contentious because of how private insurers would use them to essentially steal money from the government.
Given their propensity for abuse by the private sector, cutting back on payments seems to make sense. Unfortunately, doing so would definitely result in insurers reducing benefits claiming reduced funding, inflation, and so on.
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FDA Clears Guided Radiotherapy Tech
RefleXion medical recently received FDA approval for its Scintix therapy. Scintix is a guided radiotherapy platform that can be used to provide targeted radiotherapy to patients suffering from lung and bone cancers.
A big problem with many cancer therapies, especially chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the most common forms of therapy- is that they lack specificity which means that they will be killing a lot of healthy cells in addition to the cancer. RefleXion’s technology works by giving patients a radiolabeled drug that can be tracked in an MRI machine. This drug goes towards tumors and accumulates in the tumors, once the drug has accumulated in the tumor, it can be found in an MRI scan and be tracked as the tumor moves around.
Once doctors know where exactly the tumor is, they can start radiation therapy and focus on radiation in the areas where the tumor is thereby minimizing the radiation healthy cells are exposed to. Currently, RefleXion has drugs to target tumors in the lungs and bone and they are working on expanding their arsenal of drugs to target a greater variety of tumors.
This is an exciting development for the field of cancer treatment and makes use of existing modalities namely MRI and radiotherapy to develop a much more effective solution to fight cancer. The company is currently working on commercializing their product and getting it into hospitals so it can start impacting patients. This creates important groundwork for the field of targeted radiotherapy and provides yet another way in which cancer can be more specifically targeted and treated.
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Fake News?
Unbelievably, we found no healthcare related fake news this week. Either something is very right, or something is very wrong…
Don’t worry, the sun is not rising from the west. We checked that too.