Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Perhaps at least according to Tyler Cowen. Here is an excerpt from his Conversation with Dan Wang: WANG: …health care is what, 20% of the American GDP?COWEN: 17 point something. That’s a lot, right?WANG: That’s a lot. That feels too high to me. I feel like we should be ringing better efficiencies out here.COWEN: It seems not high enough,…
The licensing racket. Meta is not a monopoly. KFF debate on drug pricing in the US. Use of AI by pharmaceutical manufacturers. FDA and agentic AI.
That is the title of a new paper out last week in Future Oncology with co-authors Kejal Jadhav, Cheryl Warren, Sabiha Quddus, Nadine Zawadzki, Daisy Yang, Andrea Damon, Kathryn Spurrier, Katharine Batt and David Wei. The abstract is below. ObjectiveTyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have transformed the prognosis of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) into a manageable…
That is the news out of the UK today. A press release from the United Kingdom government states: A 25% increase in medicine pricing corresponds to 2 changes to the way NICE evaluates medicines; a change to the cost effectiveness thresholds and the introduction of a new value set for judging health states.NICE currently assesses value for money…
That is the title of my new publication out today with the subtitle “A case study of rifaximin for the treatment of overt hepatic encephalopathy using QALY and non-QALY measures“. This was work with co-authors Shanshan Wang, Leonardo Passos Chaves, Olamide Olujohungbe, Sanjana Muthukrishnan, and Aditi Chaudhary. The abstract is below. BackgroundTraditional cost effectiveness analyses…
Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the results from the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program for Initial Price Applicability Year (IPAY) 2027 (press release). What was the average reduction in drug prices? Across the 15 drugs included in the 2027 negotiation, on average, drug prices fell by 62% (median: 63%); accounting…
In short, ‘yes’. Barry Linden (2024) provides a nice overview of FDA’s approach to patient preference information (PPI): FDA is very open to doing this and they’re encouraging sponsors to use this kind of data to help them. The FDA’s desire to incorporate patient perspectives into their risk-benefit decision-making process started during the HIV/AIDS crisis,…
Impact of scope of practice laws in anesthesia. Reforming PBMs. UK COVID response: “Too little, too late” Enforcement of network adequacy requirements in Medicare Advantage. Access to orphan drugs in Central and Eastern Europe.
A 2024 Data Quality Framework (DQF) from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) aims to provide some guidance for drug manufacturers. Here is a summary of that document. Factors to be considered when evaluating RWD Key factors to be considered in the EMA’s DQF include: Reliability: Are the data correct? Extensiveness: Are the data enough Coherence:…
On September 19, 2025, an executive order increased the fee for new H-1B petitions from approximately $3500 to $100 000 per applicant. How is this policy likely to impact the healthcare workforce in the U.S.? A paper by Liu et al. (2025) uses Department of Labor data on certified Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) supporting H-1B visas…