Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of my paper out today in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research written with co-authors Adam Kittai, Dipen Patel, Nadine Zawadzki, Vikram Shetty, Yazan Barqawi, and Joanna Rhodes. The abstract is below. Aim: To estimate cost savings associated with covalent Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor (cBTKi) choice in patients with treatment-naive (TN) and…
Impact of ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ on rural hospital finances Brain implant lets patient with ALS speak and sing Impact of children’s disability on parent’s mental health. COVID is back? How does this man defy aging?
Suppose you have a single pill at your disposal and that pill will extend any person’s life by 10 years. You have to choose to give it to one of the following tow individuals: a 20‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies; a 70‐year‐old…
A paper by Daniotti et al. (2025) examines 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024). The authors trained neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in the GitHub code. As one can see below, nearly 1/3 of code in the US is being written by AI as of the end of 2024. US: 30.1% Germany: 24.3% France:…
Here are statistics from the CDC about the 1,197 individuals (as of 13 June 2025) that have been infected with measles during the 2025 outbreak: 793 were children (347 (29%) aged <5; 446 (37%) aged 5-19) 5% were previously vaccinated (2% with 1 MMR dose; 3% with 2 MMR doses) 144 (12%) were hospitalized 3…
This is one of the fundamental questions in health policy in recent years. Quality can be measured in two parts. First, does quality improved for targeted patients? Second, does quality improve for non-targeted patients. The first question is relatively clear. One would think that quality would improve for the patients targeted by a pay-for-performance (P4P)…
Data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) provides the answer. Data below are sorted by most to least number (N) private equity-owned hospitals. One can clearly see that Texas is leading the way in terms of raw numbers but New Mexico has the highest share of hospitals that are PE-owned. You can find more…
Recently, I published a paper noting that the risk of using prior authorization and step edits may vary by the disease to which this type of utilization management is applied. States are starting to pass legislation to limit how health insurers can use prior authorization rules. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), 10 states…
That is the topic of a Health Affairs Forefront article by Neprash, Perkins and Mehrotra (2025). This is an important question as approximately one in four visits are now provided by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) across the Medicare program. NPs and PAs can either bill payers one of two ways: They can…
That is the topic from my article out today at The Evidence Base. An excerpt is below: On May 12, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order calling for “most favored nation” (MFN) drug pricing in the US. Key questions you may have include: ▪ What is MFN pricing? ▪ Which countries will be included in…