Midweek Links
Opioid deaths start to fall. Drone drug delivery. Observatory of economic complexity. In favor of the Cadillac tax? The impact of decision fatigue.
Month: July 2019
What is the best way to include health state utilities in my CEA model?
How does one select health state utilities used to populate a cost effectiveness model? This can be a challenge as outlined in Brazier et al. (2019): Selecting evidence in an ad hoc manner results in unjustifiable conclusions and raises the possibility of cherry picking. For consistency within a model, utility data on all health states…
Are economists dumb?
Maybe so according to Arnold Kling’s askblog, who argues that annuities are not very helpful for many people. Economists think that old people who do not annuitize their wealth are dumb. I decided a long time ago that it is the economists who are dumb. Old people face many risks other than the risk of…
Surrogate Outcomes and the Prentice Criteria
Clinical trials aim to measure how different treatments affect outcomes of interest to patients. In many cases, however, measuring the ultimate outcomes of interest proves logistically difficult. For instance, measuring overall survival for some oncology patients may be impractical if survival for the standard of care is long since the required time and expense to…
Will the Cadillac tax increase or decrease out-of-pocket cost?
One piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that health insurance plans for individuals with yearly premiums exceeding $10,200 or family health insurance plans with premiums exceeding $27,500 would be subject to a tax. The tax originally was set to start in 2018, but has since been postponed to 2022. The Kaiser Family Foundation…
‘Netflix’ pricing for drugs coming to the UK?
Louisiana has already begun adopting a “Netflix” pricing model to pay for Hepatitis C treatments. Rather than pay per treatment, Louisiana would pay a flat rate per month to access as many Hepatitis C treatments as they need. The benefit of this is (i) states have predictable budgets and (ii) manufacturers have predicable revenues. This…
Links
How accurate are RVUs? Capturing the patient voice. Tools for physicians to find patient copays for drugs. New generic EpiPen hits the market. An honest man. Is Mechanical Turk trustworthy for surveys?
Experts debate Trump drug pricing policies
What will Trump’s “favored nation” policy do to drug prices and innovation? How will 340B reforms affect the price hospitals charge for drugs? Myself and my colleague Jim Baumgardner weigh in with our thoughts in an article in FormularyWatch. “US drug prices will certainly fall. However, prices outside the US will rise,” Jason Shafrin, PhD,…
Academic Health Economists’ Blog Journal Round-Up
Today I put together the journal round-up for the Academic Health Economists’ blog, one of my favorite reads. I review three papers: Understanding price growth in the market for targeted oncology therapies. American Journal of Managed Care [PubMed] Published 14th June 2019 Do cancer treatments have option value? Real‐world evidence from metastatic melanoma. Health Economics [PubMed]…
Why do pharmaceuticals cost so little to manufacture but cost so much?
A typical answer is that the cost of R&D is very high. However, an interesting book by–César Hidalgo titled Why Information Grows–offers a more conceptual rationale. Medicinal pills embody little information, as their active compound is usually a small and relative simple molecule. Yet medicinal pills can be extremely useful and valuable. Why? To understand…