Category: Economics of Technology

Innovative Air Conditioner Is Quieter and Uses Less Energy

(p. B5) There is nothing cool about window air conditioners.

They’re clunky, ugly and tend to be way too loud. Most of them are more or less identical and have been for a long time: same temperature, same efficiency, same fear of falling out the window during installation.

“There was no meaningful performance difference from unit to unit,” said Liam McCabe, a seasoned window-AC product reviewer. “Everything was a rectangular heavy box.”

At least until a sleeker, quieter, U-shaped AC came along that looked and sounded unlike any that had ever been made. It also produced less noise and required less energy, which solved the biggest problems of window air conditioners. These machines work if you turn them on and never have to think about them again. This one worked so well that it had the opposite effect. It made people completely obsessed with their air conditioning.

. . .

They had reasons to be cynical when they heard about a company disrupting window ACs, which had become commoditized in the century since the first one was patented. But when they tried it out, they found themselves blown away. Wired and Wirecutter both picked the U-shaped AC as the best on the market, and it defied everything McCabe thought he knew about window air conditioners. His years of reviewing the same old boring products turned out to be useful preparation for recognizing one that was totally different and entirely new.

“It fried my brain a bit,” he told me. “I remember thinking: This is too good to be true.”

. . .

There wasn’t much innovation or investment in ACs, said Kurt Jovais, Midea America’s president. His company would come to believe that the window AC had been undervalued.

“We know there’s a better way,” he recalled thinking. “We’re going to make sure we find what that better way is.”

That was Adam Schultz’s job. Midea America’s project manager for residential air conditioning was responsible for turning concepts into a product that wasn’t an eyesore. The quest for a less noisy, more efficient unit inspired his team to design a prototype in the shape of a U. Instead of squeezing a noise dampener inside the box to muffle noise, they essentially split the box in two and stuck the annoying clanks and thunks outside.

That is, the secret to making a better window air conditioner was taking advantage of the window.

The clever engineering solution wasn’t just effective. It was intuitive. All you had to do was look at the U shape and you would see why this AC sounds like a library.

“The window is a sound barrier,” Schultz said.

That wasn’t the only benefit of the unorthodox design. The variable-speed inverter compressor uses less energy, which means you can keep it cranking without having to worry about utility bills. You can also open your window for unconditioned fresh air, rather than bolting it down to a giant box during installation.

For the full commentary, see:

Ben Cohen. “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; The Ingenuity Behind This Air Conditioner Will Blow U Away.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 17, 2023): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 15, 2023, and has the title “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; How Did the World’s Coolest Air Conditioner Get So Hot?”)

Michael Milken Applies “Entrepreneurial Zeal” to Quest to Live Forever

(p. B3) Michael Milken wants to live forever.

. . .

Milken in April [2023] published “Faster Cures,” a book that is part memoir, part a recounting of his efforts to bring the results of medical research to patients more quickly.

. . .

Shortly after his release from prison in 1993, he received a diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer and was told he had 12 to 18 months to live. He survived thanks to a relentless pursuit of the latest treatments and a dramatic change in diet. Longevity is one focus of the Milken Institute.

. . .

While at Berkeley, Milken read a book called “Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience” that examined, among other things, yield charts and default rates for bonds issued by railroads, utilities and industrial companies between 1900 and 1943.

The data revealed something surprising, he recounted in “Faster Cures:” While risk and return had always been presumed to be directly correlated, the reality was that the market had historically overestimated the risk of higher-yielding investments. Investors actually got lower returns on a portfolio of high-grade bonds than they did on a portfolio of low-grade ones over time because the higher yields more than made up for the higher level of defaults.

Milken continued his work on high-yield bonds while pursuing an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. When he graduated in 1970, he joined the staff of Drexel, where he had previously worked as a consultant.

Bonds issued by Drexel were the primary source of financing for the likes of cable-industry titan Ted Turner, cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, fiber-optic entrepreneur William McGowan and casino magnate Steve Wynn.

“There was an entrepreneurial zeal in that firm that I haven’t seen since,” said Ted Virtue, a Drexel alumnus who now runs private-equity firm MidOcean Partners.

. . .

Milken’s work on prostate cancer has also made him an influential figure in medical research, where he has developed a reputation for being data-driven and impatient with bureaucracy. Every year he hosts a summit for scientists working on prostate cancer.

“Mike looked at the problem of cancer like a business problem to be solved,” said Dr. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society. “He wasn’t focused on the flashy. He really focused on what is going to make a difference.”

When the Prostate Cancer Foundation lacked the resources to fund a major study Knudsen needed to conduct to advance her research, she said, Milken introduced her to executives from a pharmaceutical company who he thought would be interested in the science. The company ended up funding the study.

For the full story, see:

Miriam Gottfried. “Bond King, Felon, Billionaire Philanthropist.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 15, 2023): B3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 14, 2023, and has the title “Bond King, Felon, Billionaire Philanthropist: The Nine Lives of Michael Milken.”)

Milken’s book on how to cure more diseases faster is:

Milken, Michael. Faster Cures: Accelerating the Future of Health. New York: William Morrow, 2023.

Long Waits for Italian Cabs Due to Regulations Limiting More Cabs and Ride-Sharing

(p. A4) Returning to Rome from Naples one Monday afternoon in June [2023], a train trip that takes just over an hour, Daniele Renzoni said that he and his wife waited for more than an hour and a half at Termini station for a cab under a blazing sun.

“Just image a long line of grumbling, frustrated people, complaining, cursing. Hot day, angry tourists, there’s not much else to say,” said Mr. Renzoni, who is retired. “Taxi drivers will tell you there’s too much traffic, too many requests, too much everything, but the fact is, the customer pays.”

The situation is “a disgrace to Italy,” said Furio Truzzi, president of the consumer rights group Assoutenti, one of several associations that protested the shortage.

. . .

Thanks to the taxi lobby, ride-sharing services are almost nonexistent in Italy, where Uber is the only platform in use, with many restrictions.

The government lost an opportunity for real change, said Andrea Giuricin, a transportation economist at a research center at the University of Milan Bicocca. He said the best way to meet consumer needs would be to increase the number of licenses for Italy’s chauffeur services, known as N.C.C., which work with Uber.

“It’s very difficult in Italy” because “there isn’t a culture of liberalization in general,” creating little opportunity for competition, said Professor Giuricin. Taxis “are a small but powerful lobby” that easily influences politics, “which is very weak” in Italy, he said.

Angela Stefania Bergantino, a professor of transportation economics at the University of Bari, pointed out that previous governments had tried to open up the taxi market. But they failed.

“The problem is that taxis are regulated by municipal governments, which can find themselves captive in the sense that it is difficult for City Hall to implement policies that the cab lobby doesn’t like,” she said. “These are lobbies that have effective strike tools,” like wildcat strikes or traffic blockages that can paralyze entire cities, she said.

. . .

Above all, though licenses are issued by the city, they can then be sold by the drivers, for sums that can reach 250,000 euros, or about $276,000, depending on the city — a retirement nest egg for many. With an influx of new licenses, the value of an existing license would depreciate.

City administrators fear cabbies could revolt and strike if the status quo changes. “If I decide to issue new licenses,” said Eugenio Patanè, Rome’s city councilor in charge of transportation, “I’m going to find 1,000 taxis blocking traffic in Piazza Venezia,” the downtown Rome square that taxi drivers habitually clog while protesting.

For the full story, see:

Elisabetta Povoledo. “Getting a Cab in Italy Is Hard. But Remedying That Isn’t Easy.” The New York Times (Friday, August 11, 2023): A4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 10, 2023, and has the title “Getting a Taxi in Italy Is Too Hard. Fixing That Is Not Easy.”)

“Persistent Plucky Outsiders” Innovate a Better Way to Stop Bleeding

(p. 20) Charles Barber’s “In the Blood” treats a consequential topic, and contains moments of real insight, drama and humor.

. . .

Though hemorrhage is a leading cause of death in both war and peacetime, we learn, the techniques for stopping it haven’t improved significantly for millenniums. Barber explores the mysteries of the “coagulation cascade” — during which diverse proteins activate in intricately choreographed sequence to facilitate clotting — as well as the “lethal triad” of hypothermia, acidosis and coagulopathy (impaired clotting) that can send the body into shock.

We watch a surgeon at a Navy hospital in Bethesda slit the femoral arteries of a herd of 700-pound pigs, then apply different hemostatic agents to the spurting wounds, to see which substance stops the bleeding best. Most products, backed by biotech and medical companies, fail: The poor beasts bleed out. But zeolite, a simple mineral with hitherto unknown hemostatic properties, saves their bacon every time.

Barber’s earlier books feature persistent, plucky outsiders who strive to change the world, and he finds two more likely subjects in the men who brought zeolite’s lifesaving properties to light. Frank Hursey is the brilliant, nerdy engineer who discovers that this cheap, highly porous mineral, used by industry to absorb radiation, chemicals and bad odors, also happens to accelerate clotting, by mopping up water in the blood and thereby concentrating its coagulation agents. (Later Hursey finds that another inexpensive mineral, kaolin, works even better.)

Barely anyone pays attention to Hursey’s discovery until he partners with Bart Gullong, a down-on-his-luck salesman who rebrands Hursey’s invention “QuikClot” and persuades a military scientist to try it out on people. Hursey and Gullong are soon befriended by iconoclasts within the armed forces medical establishment, more of Barber’s appealing, quirky, determined Davids, who together take on two of the biggest Goliaths around: the military-industrial complex and Big Pharma.

For the full review, see:

Tom Mueller. “The Home Front.” The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023): 20.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 26, 2023, and has the title “A Fight to Save Soldiers, From the Lab to the Battlefield.”)

The book under review is:

Barber, Charles. In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took on the Us Army. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2023.

Phage Therapy Renaissance-“Once Derided as an Idea for Cranks and Commies”

(p. C7) As engaging as it is expansive, “The Good Virus” describes the distinctive biology and murky history of bacteriophage (generally shortened to “phage”), a form of life that is remarkably abundant yet obscure enough to have been termed the “dark matter of biology.”

. . .

In a South London research institute in the early 1910s, the meticulous English bacteriologist Frederick Twort set out to grow the smallpox virus in petri dishes, hoping it could be “observed and studied like bacteria.” He succeeded in growing only contaminating bacteria, but within these colonies he noticed the occasional small clearing, as if something invisible was killing the bacteria. With the outbreak of World War I, Twort lost funding, closed his lab and published his results in 1915, cautiously suggesting that a virus could be the cause of the observed phenomenon. Few took notice.

Twort’s unlikely competitor would be Felix d’Herelle, a free-spirited Frenchman . . .

. . .

He found the same glassy spots that Twort had observed and (with noticeably less restraint) announced in 1917 that he had discovered a new form of life, which he called “bacteriophage.” D’Herelle went on to use phage to treat five sick boys successfully. But his “wild and abrasive style” (in Mr. Ireland’s words) antagonized his peers, who conspired to undermine him.

D’Herelle’s discoveries inspired many, including George Eliava, a microbiologist from the Soviet Union’s republic of Georgia. In 1936, he would establish the first institute (and still one of the few) devoted to bacteriophage research. Unfortunately for Eliava, he soon ran afoul of the Soviet secret police, who disappeared him in 1937. The institute continued to pursue the development of phage therapy and scored many victories—phage helped treat soldiers suffering from gangrene, for example. But there were also frustrating failures, in part because the phage weren’t adequately purified and often because they weren’t appropriately matched to the specific strain of infecting bacteria.

. . .

. . ., the “dubious and unreliable nature of commercial American phage products” in the 1930s, we learn, meant that “whether they worked for a particular patient was a complete lottery.”

During World War II, the West turned decisively to newly discovered penicillin, sharing the formula for it with the Soviets but not the methods of mass production. Thus the Soviets continued to rely on phage as the therapy of choice for bacterial infections. When a Soviet researcher tried to obtain production rights to penicillin in 1949, he was arrested by government authorities and died under interrogation, all for the crime of nizkopoklonstvo—adulation of the West.

. . .

Once “derided as an idea for cranks and commies,” Mr. Ireland writes, phage therapy seems to be enjoying a renaissance. Having been sustained for years by an idiosyncratic global community of true believers, phage-based medicines have now attracted the attention of high-powered biotechnologists and investors.

For the full review, see:

David A. Shaywitz. “The Enemy of My Enemy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023): C7.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original, the Russian word nizkopoklonstvo is in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date August 4, 2023, and has the title “‘The Good Virus’ Review: An Unlikely Healer.”)

The book under review is:

Ireland, Tom. The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Caution in Interpreting Alternative Explanations of Ancient Artifacts

A few weeks ago, an article highlighted the finding of female bones in a burial along with a sword. It was interpreted that the sword belonged to a distinguished female warrior and was interpreted as evidence against patriarchal assumptions.

(p. D1) The epitaph on more than one Roman tombstone read: “A gang of doctors killed me.”

Medical remedies have improved since those times — no more smashed snails, salt-cured weasel flesh or ashes of cremated dogs’ heads — but surgical instruments have changed surprisingly little. Scalpels, needles, tweezers, probes, hooks, chisels and drills are as much part of today’s standard medical tool kit as they were during Rome’s imperial era.

Archaeologists in Hungary recently unearthed a rare and perplexing set of such appliances. The items were found in a necropolis near Jászberény, some 35 miles from Budapest, in two wooden chests and included a forceps, for pulling teeth; a curet, for mixing, measuring and applying medicaments, and three copper-alloy scalpels fitted with detachable steel blades and inlaid with silver in a Roman style. Alongside were the remains of a man presumed to have been a Roman citizen.

The site, seemingly undisturbed for 2,000 years, also yielded a pestle that, judging by the abrasion marks and drug residue, was probably used to grind medicinal herbs. Most unusual were a bone lever, for putting fractures back in place, and the handle of what appears to have been a drill, for trepanning the skull and extracting impacted weaponry from bone.

The instrumentarium, suitable for performing complex operations, provides a glimpse into the advanced medical prac-(p. D4)tices of first-century Romans and how far afield doctors may have journeyed to offer care. “In ancient times, these were comparatively sophisticated tools made of the finest materials,” said Tivadar Vida, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Eötvös Loránd University, or ELTE, in Budapest and leader of the excavation.

Two millenniums ago Jászberény and the county around it were part of the Barbaricum, a vast region that lay beyond the frontiers of the Empire and served as a buffer against possible outside threats. “How could such a well-equipped individual die so far from Rome, in the middle of the Barbaricum,” mused Leventu Samu, a research fellow at ELTE and a member of the team on the dig. “Was he there to heal a prestigious local figure, or was he perhaps accompanying a military movement of the Roman legions?”

. . .

The tool-laden grave was discovered last year at a site where relics from the Copper Age (4500 B.C. to 3500 B.C.) and the Avar period (560 to 790 A.D.) had been found on the surface. A subsequent survey with a magnetometer identified a necropolis of the Avars, a nomadic peoples who succeeded Attila’s Huns. Among the rows of tombs, the researchers uncovered the man’s grave, revealing a skull, leg bones and, at the foot of the body, the chests of metal instruments. “The fact that the deceased was buried with his equipment is perhaps a sign of respect,” Dr. Samu said.

That is not the only possibility. Dr. Baker said that she often cautioned her students about interpreting ancient artifacts, and asked them to consider alternative explanations. What if, she proposed, the medical tools were interred with the so-called physician because he was so bad at his practice that his family and friends wanted to get rid of everything associated with his poor medical skills? “This was a joke,” Dr. Baker said. “But it was intended to make students think about how we jump to quick conclusions about objects we find in burials.”

For the full story, see:

Franz Lidz. “Old Roman Medicine Wasn’t So Pleasant.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 13, 2023): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story also has the date June 13, 2023, and has the title “Scalpel, Forceps, Bone Drill: Modern Medicine in Ancient Rome.”)

To Charge EV on Road Required Downloading an App, Which Required Non-Dodgy Cell Service

(p. B5) The adoption of electric vehicles represents the biggest shift in our energy and transportation systems in more than a century—but it’s also the biggest shift in consumer electronics since the debut of the iPhone. On both counts, progress is accelerating in the U.S. And on both counts, we are far from where we need to be.

A recent 1,000 mile road-trip in the longest-range electric vehicle you can buy brought this home for me. That journey was as worrisome as it was thrilling, and it clarified how much more needs to be done for drivers to have a consistent and satisfying experience on par with buying a gasoline vehicle.

. . .

On my trip, there was one moment in particular when the future felt like a big step backward.

It happened when I arrived at a street charging station in Montreal, and discovered that I’d have to download an app and prepay for the electricity I wanted to use. Cell service was dodgy, and I had to find a better signal to download the app. Had I been unable to find a decent signal, I would have been out of luck. (Even once I downloaded the app, the first station I connected to didn’t work—another issue that sometimes comes up at charging stations.)

Unfortunately, having to download an app is common practice for proprietary networks.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “Why America Isn’t Ready for the EV Takeover.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 10, 2023): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 9, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Crisis in Wind Industry Due to Inflation, Regulatory, and Grid Connection Hurdles

(p. B5) The wind business, viewed by governments as key to meeting climate targets and boosting electricity supplies, is facing a dangerous market squall.

After months of warnings about rising prices and logistical hiccups, developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions. The setbacks are piling up for both onshore and offshore projects, but the latter’s problems are more acute.

In recent weeks, at least 10 offshore projects totaling around $33 billion in planned spending have been delayed or otherwise hit the doldrums across the U.S. and Europe.

“At the moment, we are seeing the industry’s first crisis,” said Anders Opedal, chief executive of Equinor, in an interview.

. . .

The holdup of projects that could generate 11.7 gigawatts—enough to power roughly all Texas households and then some—likely pushes 2030 offshore wind targets out of reach for the Biden administration and European governments.

. . .

(p. B11) The list of woes is long: inflation, supply-chain backlogs, rising interest rates, long permit and grid connection timelines. The increasing pace of the energy transition has created a loop of escalating costs.

For the full story, see:

Mari Novik and Jennifer Hiller. “Wind Power Stumbles as Problems Mount.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023): B5 & B11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 7, 2023, and has the title “Wind Industry in Crisis as Problems Mount. The online version says that the title of the print version is “Wind Power Stumbles as Cost, Logistical Problems Mount.” But my print version of the national edition had the shorter title “Wind Power Stumbles as Problems Mount.”)

Improved AI Models Do Worse at Identifying Prime Numbers

(p. A2) . . . new research released this week reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations.

The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.

“Changing it in one direction can worsen it in other directions,” said James Zou, a Stanford professor who is affiliated with the school’s AI lab and is one of the authors of the new research. “It makes it very challenging to consistently improve.”

. . .

The goal of the team of researchers, consisting of Lingjiao Chen, a computer-science Ph.D. student at Stanford, along with Zou and Berkeley’s Matei Zaharia, is to systematically and repeatedly see how the models perform over time at a range of tasks.

Thus far, they have tested two versions of ChatGPT: version 3.5, available free online to anyone, and version 4.0, available via a premium subscription.

The results aren’t entirely promising. They gave the chatbot a basic task: identify whether a particular number is a prime number. This is the sort of math problem that is complicated for people but simple for computers.

Is 17,077 prime? Is 17,947 prime? Unless you are a savant you can’t work this out in your head, but it is easy for computers to evaluate. A computer can just brute force the problem—try dividing by two, three, five, etc., and see if anything works.

To track performance, the researchers fed ChatGPT 1,000 different numbers. In March, the premium GPT-4, correctly identified whether 84% of the numbers were prime or not. (Pretty mediocre performance for a computer, frankly.) By June its success rate had dropped to 51%.

. . .

The phenomenon of unpredictable drift is known to researchers who study machine learning and AI, Zou said. “We had the suspicion it could happen here, but we were very surprised at how fast the drift is happening.”

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Zumbrun. “THE NUMBERS; AI Surprise: It’s Unlearning Basic Math.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023): A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 4, 2023, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; Why ChatGPT Is Getting Dumber at Basic Math.”)

“An Inalienable Right to Sit In AC”

(p. C4) “Let’s sit in AC.” An American friend of mine, recently living in Mumbai, was wildly amused to hear this said in that steamy megalopolis, as if retreating to the tantalizing cool of an air-conditioned room were an activity in itself.

It took me a moment to see what he found so funny. I had grown up with the deprivations of socialist India in the 1980s. I was hardwired to fetishize air-conditioning. It was not an adjunct to life, sewn seamlessly into our daily routines, as it is in the U.S., where 82.7 million homes have central AC. It was, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant would say, the “thing-in-itself,” and to sit “in” AC was something of a national pastime.

. . .

Our first AC was an unbranded gimcrack contraption, jerry-built by a local electrician, but—my god!—how we loved it.

. . .

India loves to assert the demands of belonging through pacts of mutual suffering, and to be in AC was almost to be a little less Indian, as if you had decamped for the West. Even now that the country is the world’s fastest growing market for air-conditioners—projected by the International Energy Agency to be the biggest by 2050—the first line of attack from your average troll is: “What do you know of the realities of India, sitting in AC?”

. . .

. . . this summer, as newspapers report the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth and Amazon blasts me with discounts on their best-selling ACs, I cannot help feeling that our turn has come at a bad time. If nothing is done to make air-conditioning more energy-efficient, India alone is projected to use 30 times more electricity in 2030 than it did in 2010. Globally, air conditioning is projected to account for 40% of the growth in energy consumption in buildings by 2050—the equivalent of all the electricity used today in the U.S. and Germany combined. It’s enough to send a chill down the spine of the most ardent of AC evangelists.

The irony of a world made hotter by our need to be cool strikes some as proof of our rapacity. To me, having grown up in the place where so much of the new demand is coming from, I see it as part of a necessary realignment. As the global south gets richer, it will act as a frontier and laboratory. My hope is that it will achieve a miraculous breakthrough in energy efficiency, even as it asserts an inalienable right to sit in AC.

For the full commentary, see:

Aatish Taseer. “My Love Affair With Air- Conditioning.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 15, 2023): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 14, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Blue Cross of California Seeks to End Drug Rebates and Hidden Fees

(p. A3) A major health insurer says it will jettison the complicated system that Americans use to pay for drugs, and create something that aims to be better, with partners including Amazon.com and the entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

Blue Shield of California said it is dropping CVS Health’s Caremark, the pharmacy-benefit manager it currently uses, which negotiates drug prices and wraps in other services such as a mail-order pharmacy.

. . .

Blue Shield said that, working with its partners, it aims to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical makers in a way that is different from the typical approach—with a simple net price structure that is supposed to eliminate rebates and hidden fees.

Blue Shield executives said that with one company handling many aspects of how drugs are procured through the system, it is often hard to track the flow of payments accurately.

“The current pharmacy supply chain is a forest of opacity and profit,” said Paul Markovich, Blue Shield’s chief executive officer, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It is overwhelmingly complex, it is designed to maximize the earnings of the participants.” His company’s new setup, he said, will be “flipping that on its head.”

For the full story, see:

Anna Wilde Mathews. “Health Insurer Revamps Drug Pricing Model.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Aug. 18, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 17, 2023, and has the title “A Big Health Insurer Is Ripping Up the Playbook on Drug Pricing.”)