Alex Caudill

Radiology resident.
Tweets are my own super-original and super-funny opinions.

[Alex Caudill @ahcaudill]

@hjluks Great thread. Hope your eye is mending.

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

CNN takes a sample of the water in the Reflecting Pool to test it

They did more investigation on this than the billion dollar fraud happening across the country

[david friedberg @friedberg]

government destroys value.

in this case, the value of an American education was destroyed in ~40 years.

if there’s no marketplace for customers (parents of students) to demand value (quality of education for price paid) by simply going to another service provider (school or educator), it is inevitable that costs will go up and quality will go down.

this is true of any service provided by government, which effectively grants itself a monopoly, deleting the opportunity for other service providers to compete in offering better value to customers/citizens…

[Real Doc Speaks @realdocspeaks]

This needs to be on a Times Square Billboard! 50% of health care spending is going to hospitals.

The majority of which pay no taxes, and their version of community benefit is:

1. Paying the CEO $30 million
2. Suing patients for unpaid bills that qualify for their
Financial assistance policy
3. Opening up offshore investment funds
4. Sponsoring professional sports teams
5. Closing down less profitable service lines like
labor and delivery units
6. Putting the 340B money into the general fund
7. Lapping up the facility fees
8. Spending more money on administration than patient
care
9. Having zero fear that the IRS will pull their nonprofit
status

There is NO justification for a hospital system to own hospitals across state lines!

[Whemïmor @hy_wemmy]

I hate how much of life revolves around money. Earning it, spending it, saving it, worrying about it……it’s exhausting.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Corporation: "We made $4B but spent $3.9B so we only owe taxes on $100M."
Government: "Totally reasonable."

You: "I made $60K but spent $58K on survival."
Government: "You owe taxes on $60K."
You: "That's not—"
Government: "File by May 15."

[Christine Price @HEALTHCOSTtruth]

$5,614.12 saved on a single CT scan.
Same procedure code (74177 — CT abdomen and pelvis with contrast). Two hospitals. One bill.

Physician-owned hospital (pays real estate taxes, gets no grants): $951.38 self-pay.

Non-profit hospital (pays no real estate taxes, receives federal and state grants): $6,565.50 cash price.

There's a lot of discussion lately about whether physician-owned hospitals inflate charges as massively as non-profits. This is one example from my personal experience. The "non-profit" charged nearly 7x more for the same scan than the for-profit physician-owned hospital.

Section 6001 of the ACA froze new physician-owned hospitals in 2010. The hospital lobby called it patient protection. The data calls it competition suppression.

We all got screwed when they stopped physicians from owning hospitals.

Section 6001 should be repealed.

Do your homework. Support the hospitals that help us. Avoid the ones that don't. Simple as 1-2-3.

#healthcarecosts #POH

[Dr Phoxotic @Phoxotic]

The market value of the Star Wars franchise is so low now that George Lucas should buy it back at a profit and say that all of the Disney movies are no longer canon.

[Criticless Blaine @CriticlessBA]

For all the people constantly defending the destruction of one of the worlds biggest brands, it's probably time to hang it up.

When a Star Wars film gets passed opening week by a movie made for 750k... It's dead. The brand is dead.

Good job Kathleen Kennedy & Friends.

[Spike @spikesguides]

POV you're already doing 30 over the limit in the slow lane and the fast lane is empty

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

Stop a statin and your LDL cholesterol rises 30% in four days. Nobody writes a WSJ feature about it. Stop certain blood pressure medications and your BP can spike within hours. Nobody calls it a design flaw.

Levothyroxine, antidepressants, insulin, metformin, antihistamines. Chronic treatments for chronic conditions, and all of them stop working when you stop taking them. None of them generate think-pieces questioning whether patients should have started.

The AMA classified obesity as a disease in 2013. Thirteen years later, it’s still the only chronic condition where “you have to take it forever” is framed as an argument against treatment rather than a description of how medicine works.

[Sean Frank @Seanfrank]

hot take:
fighting about water use is stupid

with more energy, you can turn salt water into fresh water. the world is mostly salt water.

the answer to every problem is more, cheap, energy.

solar panel the desert, a nuclear reactor in every town

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

If insurance companies can deny care and call it "medically unnecessary", why aren't they required to have malpractice insurance doe when they get it wrong and someone gets sicker or tragically dies ?

[Alex Caudill @ahcaudill]

@GoodAMLiberty @friedberg @jason add to docket plz

[Noah Ryan @NoahRyanCo]

You cannot go anyhwere in the US anymore without feeling taking advantage of. Every restaurant, every lease agreement, every purchase. Everything is so blatantly predatory. Like they don't even care to be subtle about the fact that they're operating in bad faith.

And we're all just submissive to it

[Sophia ❣️ @KeruboSk]

Work. Work. Work. Stay hydrated. Go to the dentist. 10,000 steps. “What’s for dinner?” Insurance. Drink water. Pay a bill. Pay a bill. Smile. Credit Score. Check engine light. Go get gas. ALLERGIES! TAXES! STUDENT LOANS! Phone storage full. Email. Email. Apple $12.99. Apple $9.99. Subscriptions. Subscription. Overdraft. Laundry. Fold. Text. Text. Text. Clean the house. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” Doctors appoinment. Hair appoinment. Nail appointment. RENT. WAR! GOVERNMENT! POLITICS! THE PRESIDENT!!

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

The word “nonprofit” has a precise legal meaning.

It means no shareholders.
It does not mean no profit.

It does not mean no executive compensation,
no acquisitions,
no lobbying,
no market consolidation,
no subsidiary LLCs,
and no $14 million CEO salary.

It means the surplus gets reinvested in the organization rather than distributed to investors.

In practice, this means the executives decide what counts as reinvestment.

$527 billion in revenue.
$275 billion in annual tax exemptions.
2.3% of revenue spent on charity care.

The Form 990 is a public document.

Twenty-five of them have been assembled and read, so you do not have to.

The results are not surprising.
They are simply not reported.

🔥🔥🔥

[Jason Locasale @LocasaleLab]

Mr. Cuban is right that nonprofit medical schools attached to massive hospital systems have no business charging $300,000+ in tuition while university and hospital administrators collect seven- and eight-figure compensation packages. If the mission is public health, the financial structure shouldn’t resemble a corporate executive pyramid.

But tuition is only one issue. A deeper distortion is the artificial scarcity they created. Medical schools, their accrediting bodies, and their professional associations have tightly limited enrollment for decades, deliberately constraining physician supply. At the same time, the training pathway is unnecessarily long, delaying meaningful earnings into midlife and effectively forcing physicians to command higher salaries later to compensate for a lost decade of income.

In an era of AI and self-directed learning, we should be asking which parts of training are truly educational necessities and which are simply institutional gatekeeping. The current regulatory structure protects salaries and administrative hierarchies while undermining access and market dynamics. If workforce expansion and healthcare access is the goal, supply constraints and training design — not just tuition — have to be on the table.

[Handre @Handre]

LASIK eye surgery cost $2,200 per eye in 2000. Today it's around $1,000 per eye despite 24 years of inflation. Meanwhile, an MRI that cost $1,200 in 2000 now costs $3,000+. The difference? LASIK operates in a free market with no insurance interference and minimal regulation.

When patients pay directly, providers must compete on price and quality. LASIK clinics advertise prices, offer financing, and constantly improve technology to attract customers. Compare this to hospital procedures where prices are hidden, patients never see bills, and insurance companies negotiate opaque rates that somehow always increase faster than inflation.

Cosmetic surgery follows the same pattern. Breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and other elective procedures have become more affordable and safer over decades. Surgeons invest in better techniques and equipment because they must satisfy paying customers, not insurance bureaucrats or hospital administrators focused on maximizing reimbursements.

The lesson is clear: remove third-party payment systems and excessive regulation, and you get Austrian economics in action. Prices fall, quality rises, and innovation accelerates. Healthcare costs aren't rising because of aging populations or new technology—they're rising because we've destroyed the price mechanism that makes markets work.