The Healthcare Economist on NPR
Check out my interview on NPR with Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson about what recent changes in health insurance premiums changes mean for the future of the Affordable Care Act.
Month: October 2016
The value of adherence information
A study titled “Estimating the Value of New Technologies That Provide More Accurate Drug Adherence Information to Providers for Their Patients with Schizophrenia” was just published in the November edition of JMCP. This is work with co-authors Taylor T. Schwartz, Darius N. Lakdawalla, and Felicia M. Forma. The abstract is below. Go check it out! …
Friday Links
Rising drug prices. QPP. Healthcare-wide CER. The age of tech. AI and medicine.
How are payers tackling value-based drug pricing?
A growing number of value-based drug pricing arrangements are tying the price of treatments to outcomes. While these payment models are far from prominent now, is it likely that drug makers will have a greater share of the risks and rewards associated with value-based care moving forward? This is what is written in a feature…
Obamacare Death Spiral?
Health insurance premiums are projected to increase an astronomical 25% for plans in the health insurance exchanges. Some pundits claim that these increases represent that Obamacare is crumbling or in a death spiral. As premiums rise, healthy people flee the market. This leaves insurers with only more sick individuals which leads to premium increases. More…
Chocolate Bar
A truly amazing and uplifting story from Kind World from WBUR about a boy with Glycogen Storage Disease Type 1b, his friend and the Chocolate Bar Book. LANTZ: Dylan is 10 years old now. But this story starts when the boys were in first grade. Dylan’s mom Debra Siegel was driving her son home from…
Extended Cost Effectiveness Analysis
Cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) examines whether treatment benefits outweight treatment costs on average for a given patient population. A 2016 paper by Verguet, Kim and Jamison examine the concept of extended cost effectiveness analysis (ECEA) which applies cost effectiveness methodologies to health care policies. The policies are evaluated over 4 domains: (1) health gains; (2)…
Friday Links
Should prisoners get a cure for HCV? Food stamps and beer. Cutting a cake fairly. Uber for caregivers. MSF rejects 1m free vaccines.
The Health Wonk Review is up
Peggy Salvatore has posted Health Wonk Review Election Edition – Mama Says Eat Your Peas and Don’t Forget to Vote at Health Systems Ed Blog.
Bad news for Obamacare?
Premiums are rising. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell stated: Building a new market is never easy,” she told the group at HHS headquarters. “We expect this to be a transition period for the marketplace. Issuers are adjusting their prices, bringing them in line with actual data on costs.” Burwell’s comments foreshadow the higher premiums expected when…