Disparities in Schizophrenia Care

Do African Americans and Latinos receive the same quality care as Caucasians?  This is the question asked by Horvitz-Lennon et al. (2014). Quality of Care Before one can answer this question, one first has to define what “quality care” means.  The authors use the following definition for pharmacological indicators: Any use of antipsychotic drugs, Conditional on…

What is Reference Pricing?

To reduce utilization of pharmaceutical products, many countries have opted to use reference pricing. Reference pricing is a system where patient coinsurance payments depend not only on the price of the drug but also the price of alternatives therapies.  As the name indicates, reference pricing sets patient coinsurance rates as the difference between the drug’s…

Did Hospital VBP work?

How can Medicare improve quality and reduce cost? One idea is to introduce value-based purchasing (VBP). For instance, Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing (HVBP) system increases payment rates for hospitals that demonstrate high quality. A paper by Ryan et al. (2014) explains the program in more detail. Under HVBP, acute care hospitals—those paid under Medicare’s Inpatient…

First biosimilar hits the market

Making a generic version of a single molecule drug is fairly straightforward.  Making a replica of a biologic treatment, however, is not.  Nevertheless, Congress signed into law the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 (BPCI Act) to create a fast-track approval process for biological products that are demonstrated to be highly similar an FDA-approved biological product.  These products…

Cavalcade of Risk #213

There are many types of risk. There are health risks and financial risks, systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk. And some risks are riskier than others: In this week’s edition of the Cavalcade of Risk, the best of the blog-o-sphere give their opinions on a handful of risky issues. Why do your health insurance rates increase…