What I Read This Week...

Doctors are renaming mild prostate cancers, higher medical costs hit insurers, and an ideology gap is opening up between men and women

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Caught my eye…

• A growing number of doctors are advocating that low-grade prostate cancers that grow very slowly or not at all should not be called cancer, fearing that the term may frighten men and even their doctors into pursuing more aggressive treatments than may be necessary. This isn’t the first time the name of a cancer has been changed. Certain forms of thyroid, cervical and bladder cancers have previously been reclassified to avoid scaring people about cancers that are unlikely to spread.

• Health insurance company Humana reported steep losses in Q4’23 and signaled that there was more to come due to higher than expected medical costs. Humana, which focuses on Medicare plans, warned that seniors enrolled in its plans were using more healthcare than anticipated. The issues are expected to persist for years, suggesting that the industry will either need to raise prices or cut benefits to boost margins.

• A wide ideology gap is opening up between young men and women under 30 across the globe. In the past, men and women were spread relatively evenly across liberal and conservative world views. Recently, however, a gap has emerged. In the U.S., women aged 18 to 30 are now ~30 percentage points more liberal than their male counterparts. The same is true in Germany and the UK, where women are ~30 and ~25 points more liberal.

Other reading…

• Gene Therapy Breakthrough Allows Congenitally Deaf Children to Hear (Harvard Gazette)

• MrBeast in Talks for TV Show on Amazon’s Prime Video (Variety)

• San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done (NY Times)

• U.S. National Security Agency Buys Web Browsing Data Without Warrant (Reuters)

• Streaming Pirates Are Hollywood’s New Villains (Bloomberg)

• The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century (NY Times)

• The Rise of Palworld: How ‘Pokémon With Guns’ Became an Overnight Hit (Wired)

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