Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Reference-based pricing seems like an attractive option. Basically, health insurers pay some amount (e.g., the lowest price, median price, average of lowest X prices) for a given service. If patients want a higher priced option, they must pay the difference. The approach assures patients have access to care but makes patients responsible if they don’t…
Of course, clinical trials demonstrate whether a drug is efficacious or not, but are new drugs effective in the real world on average? Have they improved health outcomes at the country level? And do they provide good value? A series of recent paper by Frank Lichtenberg (see Lichtenberg 2019, Lichtenberg 2020a, Lichtenberg 2020b) aims to…
There is a large literature on this topic including fairly recent work from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (see Finkelstein et al. (QJE 2012), Baicker et al. AER 2014, Finkelstein et al. JPE 2019). Many of these studies look at the population level; as the majority of people are healthy, the incremental benefit for health…
The Economist has a interesting article on how the Latin American health care system is/will be able to cope with a potential increase in cases of COVID-19. In general, the Latin American health care system may be better than many naive outside observers may think. …Latin American health systems, though still smaller and less well…
Predicting what will happen in pharmaceutical policy in 2020 (written pre-COVID) Four benchmarks for reopening the country. Cash benchmarking. Connecting academic health economists with policymakers. What does recovery from COVID-19 look like?
Ultimately, individuals and households pay for health care. Whether payments are made directly to providers, via taxes or through commercial insurance, households are the sole source of health care financing. Further, all treatments are ultimately provided on behalf of individuals and households. A key question, however, is which types of individuals pay more for health…
Academic health centers often have a glowing reputation among clinicians and the general public of being the best of the best. In many cases, simple analysis of the numbers does not seem to back this assertion up. Part of the reason is selection bias. Academic and community health centers do not treat the same types…
This is the title of my article at pharmaphorum. The precis of the article is below. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) measures the value of new drugs and health technologies, but faces a number of key challenges such as keeping their assessments up to date with new evidence, allowing for different perspectives…
Top 10 HEOR trends in 2020. Marketing works: Informational outreach and the insurance mandate. Delivery system performance as financial risk varies Another failed intervention targeting superutilizers. Cancer and coronavirus.
Nurse practitioner employment has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2017 according to Auerbach et al. (2020). If nurse practitioners can provide similar quality for some services at lower cost, nurse practitioners could save money. If nurse practitioners can help better leverage physician time for more complex services, and increase access to care, they may be…