Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) recently announced that it would annually review treatments with significant price increases to determine if these changes are unsupported by evidence on value. I was recently interviewed by Radar on Specialty Pharmacy to discuss the topic. Jason Shafrin, Ph.D., a senior director of policy and economics at…
In a recently published paper in PharmacoEconomics, I–along with co-authors Devin Incerti, Jeff Curtis, Darius Lakdawalla, and Jeroen Jansen–describe a recently developed open-source platform for measuring the value of treatments for rheumatoid arthritis. The model itself is here, but and the abstract from Incerti et al. (2019) is below: Objective The nature of model-based cost-effectiveness…
A number of medical studies have touted the benefits of medical marijuana. But who actually uses medical cannibis? Some statistics from Boenhke et al. (2019) provide the answer: While conventional wisdom hold that medical marijuana is frequently used for glaucoma, in practice, this medical marijuana is much more likely to be used to treat other…
Women in economics. Opioids and hepatitis C. Fax machines never die. War on drug-related deaths. Expanding tech in clinical trials.
The priority drug review process was enacted in 2012 in order to stimulate drug development for rare pediatric diseases. Drugs granted priority review had the typical ten-month FDA review timeline shortened to 6 months. For a drug to be eligible for this program, it must not only be for a rare disease but it must…
As I have done in previous years, below I review and comment on all of the President’s statements related to health care that come from his state of the union address. Many of us have campaigned on the same core promises, to defend American jobs and demand fair trade for American workers, to rebuild and…
If you have multiple sclerosis, effective disease modifying therapies (DMTs), can help to reduce relapse rates and slow disease progression. That is, if you can get access to them. A paper by Hartung et al. (2019) found the following when examining 2007-2016 Prescription Drug Plan Formulary files concerning DMT coverage among Part D plans: Among…
Spouse vs. patient preferences for nursing homes. Food swamps. Medicaid and moral hazard. Medicare access to anti-opioid medications. The price ain’t right. Brexit and access to pharmaceuticals. Cure for cancer?