My Weekly Reading and Viewing for August 17, 2025
by Akiva Malamet, Bautista Vivanco, and Michael F. Cannon, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025.
Excerpts:
While Ozempic and other GLP‑1 drugs are great at helping patients lose weight(among many other promising uses), these impressive medications come with an impressive price tag. For those paying out of pocket, a month’s supply can cost around $1,000.
Congress prohibits Medicare from subsidizing anti-obesity medications but allows GLP‑1 drugs for the treatment of diabetes and cardiovascular disease (a particularly vulnerable subset of its beneficiary population). The Congressional Budget Office studied the budgetary impact of authorizing Medicare to subsidize anti-obesity medications. It concluded that subsidizing GLP‑1 drugs for obesity would have a net cost to taxpayers of $31.5 billion between 2026 and 2034.
And:
Employer-Sponsored Green Card Processing Takes 3.4 Years, All-Time HighMore recently, our colleague Jeffrey Singer argued that Congress can and should eliminate FDA barriers for compounding pharmacies. Singer also emphasized the benefits of removing prescription requirements. Combined, these reforms would significantly increase competition and render GLP-1s more accessible.
In a competitive market, price-sensitive patients put downward pressure on the prices of the medical goods and services they need or want. Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance create multiple levels of separation between patients and the price of medical goods and services. The more insensitive patients are to the price of care, the less pressure they put on providers to reduce prices. This makes health care more expensive and less accessible for everyone.
by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025.
Excerpt:
Immigrant workers seeking a green card—which denotes legal permanent residence in the United States—now face almost a three-and-a-half-year wait to make it through the government’s regulatory morass. Paying a $2,805 fee could reduce this wait to “only” 2.8 years. Since 2016, the government has added over 18 months to the average green card process. This needs to change to keep America competitive.
The processing delays come on top of the time to wait for a green card cap slot to become available under the annual green card caps (which is often many years). They also don’t include the time spent complying with regulations prior to the first filing step. This prefiling period can take months.
DRH comment: I’m so glad I got my green card in 1977, when it took only a few months.
The Price of Pragmatism: How the Court’s Retreat from the Constitution Fueled Mass Incarcerationby Mike Fox, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025.
Excerpt:
NYU Law Professor Rachel Barkow has written an extraordinary new book, Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration. It is a damning indictment of our judicial system’s complicity in the dramatic expansion of incarceration over the past several decades. Judge-made changes in the law have created a new status quo: The United States—with five percent of the world’s population—now contains 25 percent of its prisoners.
Barkow’s central thesis is that the Supreme Court has failed to execute its core function: to safeguard individual liberties against the encroaching power of the state. Even worse, it has cloaked this failure in the guise of public safety. As Barkow explains, the Court has refused to “police the police.” When supervision of government fails, egregious abuses of authority go unchecked. The Court’s failure to enforce constitutional guarantees has enabled mass incarceration to metastasize.
DRH Note: I didn’t notice until I started posting, but 3 out of 3 of my weekly highlights are from one source: Cato at Liberty. Good for them. So would be the 4th, so I’ll refrain from posting it and, instead, post a link to an excellent forum held by the Independent Institute.
by Jeff Hummel and Phil Magness, Independent Institute, August 13, 2025.
Jeff does an excellent job of questioning and Phil knocks it out of the park with his answers. Truly amazing how low the New York Times sunk.
I recommend listening at 1.25 speed. You won’t miss much by skipping Q&A, which starts at about the 42:00 point, although there is an interesting question (and an informative answer) about how Abe Lincoln thought of getting slaves to emigrate.
Even if you have little time to listen, check out the story of the New York Times fact checker at 15:14.
My favorite line, though, which gave me goosebumps, is at 12:34.
econlib
