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Advice for working in DC. The optimizer’s curse. MDs and friendship. AI models have internal thoughts. The originator of “GOOOAL!!!”
Financial Impact of Treatment Choice in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia
That is the title of a recent paper out in ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research with co-authors Jennifer Vaughn, Nadine Zawadzki, Shurui Zhang, Paul Pinkston, and David Wei. The subtitle is A Comparison of Later Generation TKIs versus Imatinib from Patient and Payer Perspectives. The abstract is below: Purpose: To evaluate the financial impact of treating CML…
What are copay accumulators?
KFF reports on the increased use of copay accumulators: Oscar Health is one of many commercial health insurers that use what are often called copay accumulator programs to keep funds that are meant to defray patients’ out-of-pocket costs for expensive specialty drugs. Over the past decade, more insurers have adopted such strategies to reduce their prescription…
On the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship
“I will maintain that there is no comparably important question in economics, because this is the question of human progress. This is the question of human wellbeing over millennia. Everything else about resource allocation, about policy, about macro…everything else is a footnote to this larger question of how new things come into being and how…
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Why were COVID trials so fast. Innovation without access? The growing tension in rare disease coverage Why rent control fails Spending growth at the state level Screwworms and flesh-eating bacteria.
How did Washington State’s PDAB select drugs?
Many policymakers are looking for ways to reduce drug spending. Federal policymakers are not the only ones looking at the issue. In recent years, state Prescription Drug Affordability Boards (PDABs) have formed to reduce drug prices. A paper by Barthold et al. (2026) describes the what PDABs are: As of April 2025, 12 states had…
What’s missing from CBO scoring in health?
That is the topic of a JAMA Health Forum article by my USC colleagues Dana Goldman and Erin Trish. In it, the note that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) does good work, but the scope of their analysis is limited. CBO only estimates the impact on policies on government budgets; CBO’s remit does not evaluate…
Who participates in the clinical trials of FDA-approved drugs?
The answer is provided by FDA’s 2025 Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report. The report covers 46 novel drug approvals and roughly 26,000 participants across pivotal trials, organized by therapeutic area rather than a single aggregate narrative. Half (23 out of 46) of these approvals were for the treatment of rare or orphan diseases (i.e., diseases…
Pharmaceutical Manufacturer response to Most Favored Nation (MFN): Delay, Hide or Confuse?
Today I attended the very interesting ISPOR Health Policy Leadership Exchange (HPLE) in Washington DC on the topic of Most Favored Nation (MFN). There were a number of important points made and I’ll summarize a few of them. First, US drug prices are much higher than in other OECD countries. An ASPE report from 2024…
How much does the US spend on health care?
Fiore et al. (2026) just released their annual national health expenditure projections in Health Affairs. I summarize some of the key findings in Q&A format. How much is the US currently spending on health care? $5.7 trillion. This is represents an increase in healthcare spending as a share of GDP from 18.0% in 2024 to…