Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As I do every year, here are the books I read and enjoyed this year. Non-fiction. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. This is probably not the most ‘fun’ book I read for the year, but it is the one that is likely to have the biggest…
That is the question asked in a recent Health Affairs Forefront article by Peter Neumann, Josh Cohen, Sean Sullivan and Feng Xie. They compare the CMS negotiated prices for Initial Price Applicability Year (IPAY) 2027 against value-based prices (using QALYs) from the Tufts Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) Registry. The authors found that cost-effectiveness estimates varied among…
Republicans are pushing for increased use of high deductible health plans (HDHP). HDHPs have increased over time, from 29% of all employer health plans in 2021 to 33% of all employer health plans in 2025. One country that has successfully used HDHP is Singapore. A 2020 Commonweath Fund Report summarizes 3 components of the Singapore’s…
There are four primary types of uncertainty in health economic modelling: Heterogeneity: Variation between individuals that can be explained by their characteristics Stochastic uncertainty: Variation between individuals that cannot be explained by their characteristics, Parameter uncertainty: Uncertainty in the estimated values for the parameters that define the model Structural uncertainty: Uncertainty in model outcomes that…
That is the title of a paper by Longo et al. (2025). The authors use dynamic panel data on Adult Social Care (ASC) in the UK. What is ASC include: A quick explainer about ASC in the UK: In England, there are 152 upper-tier local authorities (LAs) who are responsible for publicly-funded ASC services. Access…
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…