Regulating 23andMe

A number of companies, such as 23andMe, allow individuals to sequence their own genes in order to attempt to determine if they have an elevated risk for certian diseases. This sector has largely been unregulated…until now. The Economist reports, On November 22nd the FDA…sent a stern letter to 23andMe, a genetic-testing firm. Despite “more than…

Thanksgiving Cheat Sheet

What happens if you’re having Thanksgiving dinner and the topic turns to health care.  Or worse, the status of Healthcare.gov and the Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges.  What do you do? How do you sound in the know, even if you’ve been slacking off any haven’t ready my blog for months?  The Wall Street Journal provides…

The Growth of Nonphysician Clinicians

If you are an avid reader of this blog, you’ve heard about nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs).  What you might not know is how they popularity has grown over the past decade.  A paper by Strange (2013) cites the following statistics: With more than 85,000 PAs and 150,000 NPs eligible to practice, their…

HWR: Pre-Thanksgivukkah edition

Hank Stern has posted a fresh edition of Health Wonk Review at InsureBlog – and it’s a special one: Health Wonk Review: Pre-Thanksgivukkah edition. What is Thansgivukkah?  Hank explains: This year (2013/5774), the first night of Chanukah falls on Thanksgiving, and that happy (if confusing) confluence of events won’t happen again for another 78,000 years. This…

What is value-based pricing?

Where has public policy gone in the last few years?  Popular policies include move towards more bundled payments, the creation of accountable care organizations, additional funding for comparative effectiveness research (CER), evidence-based medicine (EBM) and value-based purchasing programs that link payments to various quality metrics. With health care costs rising, payers are looking to decrease…

Do physicians care about patients’ cost?

A paper by Li and Laxminarayan (Health Econ forthcoming) examines an interesting question: Are physicians sensitive to drug prices faced by their patients? In an ideal world, physicians act as perfect agents for their patients, taking into consideration their medical needs and financial constraints. In reality, the choice of drug and whether a generic or brand-name…