Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Previous analyses–such as Basu and Manning 2009–have addressed the problem of mass of health care expenditures around $0. In typical economic analyses, we assume that the dependent variable is normally distributed. In the case of health care expenditures, however, a large number of people have $0 expenditures (i.e., healthy individuals). Further, among sick individuals that…
That is the title of my latest article in Pharmaceutical Market Europe. An excerpt is below. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are regarded as the gold standard of scientific evidence, and for good reason. By randomizsing a treatment across study arms, RCTs eliminate patient-treamtent selection bias, resulting in reliable causal inference. In contrast, in the real…
Words matter. 2017: Most drug approvals in 21 years. Digital medicine comes to your gut. “raising the level of discussion around value in health care” Spanish flu myths.
Science facts from 2017. Peak pharma? 2017 year in charts. Nature’s 10. Physicians ignore an important source of data…the patient. “If you don’t sit and talk with a patient for a half hour, in terms of your job description no one is going to be mad at you. But if you don’t know what the hemoglobin…
Typically, we look at how changes in cost sharing affect patient demand. However, rules regarding patient cost sharing also influence life sciences firms’ decisions about what price they should use for their products. A paper by Herr and Suppliet (2017) looks at the effect of changing cost-sharing rules in Germany in their latest paper. The…
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to increase health insurance coverage largely through two pathways: (i) raising the income limits for individuals to qualify for Medicaid, (ii) creating new health insurance exchanges and health insurance subsidies to encourage the purchase of private health insurance among individuals that were not eligible for Medicaid. Other provisions, such…