Friday Links
The for-profit charity? The reliability of Chinese RCT data. 122. Hackable insulin pumps? Nano cars
Month: October 2016
Health reform and health insurance churn
The Affordable Care Act provides a lifeline for individuals previously “too rich” for Medicaid, but who did not have access to employer-provided insurance. First, making Medicaid eligibility rules more generous lead to more people just above the poverty line getting access to health insurance. Second, the “Obamacare” health insurance exchanges offered community-rated, income-subsidized health insurance coverage for people…
China fabricates clinical trial data?
Academic integrity is one of the bedrocks upon which research is founded. With that said, it is with great concern that I came across an article that stated that 80% of Chinese clinical trials data is fabricated. Science Alert reports: The review looked at data from 1,622 clinical trial programs of new pharmaceutical drugs awaiting regulator approval for mass…
Should cost-effectiveness analysis ignore the price of the drug?
Cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) aims to examine whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the costs. However, whenever one is conducting a CEA a key question is benefits to whom and costs to whom. For instance, a modestly efficacious drug may be cost effective from the patient’s perspective if all or most costs are covered by insurance.…
Did BPCI work?
BPCI is Medicare’s Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative. For selected conditions, hospitals receive bundled payments that can include concurrent physician payments, post acute-care or other arrangements. The question is, does this payment approach improve quality and reduce cost? A study by Dummit et al. (2016) looked at lower extremity joint replacement at a BPCI-participating hospital. They found the…