08-29-2016, 12:54 AM
But a closer look at the rollouts of Kalydeco and Zaltrap reveals startling differences in how companies value a drug and justify its price. It also provides a preview of a likely future in which extremely costly drugs are common. Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the most expensive drugs. The primary customers in the United States are not patients or even individual physicians, although physicians can drive demand for a drug; rather, the customers are the government (through Medicare and Medicaid) and private insurance companies. And since the insurer or government is picking up the check, companies can and do set prices that few individuals could pay. In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is “price inelastic”
A year of profit stagnation has left the S&P 500 Index’s price-earnings ratio flirting with some of its its highest readings since the Internet bubble. Judged against bonds, though, stocks remain stubbornly cheap. Plotting the index’s per-share earnings against the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a technique sometimes referred to as the Fed Model, shows the S&P 500 is still less expensive than any time during the 2002 to 2007 bull market. Stock valuations are held down in the comparison by some of the lowest bond payouts ever.
The S&P 500 Valuation Tool That Shows 2007 Peak a Long Way Away - Bloomberg
"What I think is very interesting about this phenomenon is we call it 'binge watching,' which is a social pejorative," she says."We don't say we're binge reading if we tuck ourselves away with a Dickens novel, but we call it binge watching because we couldn't do this before. ... There are actually lots of positives in watching media. It allows you to experience emotions, it can be cathartic and it allow you to see models of different sorts of behaviors." But the number of experts and studies arguing the opposite position is bigger, as is often the case in the early days of an emerging trend. And they can be fairly alarming. Here's a look at some of the reported downsides facing people who take binge watching too far.
Depression, disease, and no sex are some dangers of binge watching
AT THE height of the euro crisis, with government-bond yields soaring in several southern European countries and defaults looming, the European Central Bank and the healthier members of the currency club fended off disaster by offering bail-outs. But these came with conditions, most notably strict fiscal discipline, intended to put government finances back on a sustainable footing. Some economists argued that painful budget cuts were an unfortunate necessity. Others said that the cuts might well prove counterproductive, by lowering growth and therefore government revenues, leaving the affected countries even poorer and more indebted. In 2013 economists at the IMF rendered their verdict on these austerity programmes: they had done far more economic damage than had been initially predicted, including by the fund itself. What had the IMF got wrong when it made its earlier, more sanguine forecasts? It had dramatically underestimated the fiscal multiplier.
Where does the buck stop? | The Economist
A majority of patients at the clinic falsely believed that SPF 30 was twice as protective as SPF 15. That does seem like it should be true. But it’s nowhere close, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. SPF 30 is roughly four percent more protective than SPF 15—SPF 15 filters out around 93 percent of UV-B rays, and SPF 30 filters out around 97 percent. That difference is not nothing, but it is so small that lower SPF values may even be more effective in the long run, once behavioral psychology comes into play. Because the real factors that determine how well a sunscreen works is how much we use and how often we reapply. When we feel very well protected, we’re less likely to reapply frequently and to seek shade. It’s the same effect that led researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research to warn that the overall safety benefit of bike helmets can sometimes be mitigated if helmeted bikers, feeling protected, ride less cautiously.
One of our main systems of preventing cancer is misleading and misunderstood - Business Insider