Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
I’ve mentioned this in a number of previous posts, but large scale importation from Canada won’t work to bring down US drugs prices. The US market is too large and Canada does not have the supply to meet US demand. Further, policies proposing drug importation from Canada assume that Canadians will be passive actors in…
Don’t expect any turkey recipes from the CDC, but the do advise a fair amount of caution during this Thanksgiving holiday. More than 1 million COVID-19 cases were reported in the United States over the last 7 days.As cases continue to increase rapidly across the United States, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to…
If we break down the numbers, it turns out that medical costs–rather than pharmacy cost–are the key drivers of differences in health care spending per capita. This is the findings from Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) study comparing US spending against an average from 9 other countries rich countries (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the…
COVID-19 has had a disastrous effect on the economy. While some portion of the economic effect is people becoming ill, much of the effect is due to individuals changing behavior to avoid contracting the disease. For instance, people are much less likely to go shopping, eat at restaurants, and travel. These latter effects are termed…
Understanding trends in COVID-19 transmission rates is vital both public health monitoring and policymaking decisions. However, diagnostic capacity may be limited, and test sampling is often non-random, and often COVID-19 cases are not reported when patients have mild or asymptomatic disease. What is the solution? A paper in Nature Biotechnology argues that wastewater testing may…
That is the basic question that Reed et al. (2020) attempt to answer in their recent paper. The approach they use is as follows: We designed a discrete-choice experiment to administer 10 choice questions to each respondent representing experimentally controlled pairs of scenarios defined by when nonessential businesses could reopen (May, July, or October 2020),…
Who gets the vaccine first? Amazon Pharmacy. What’s different now? Interoperability and the pandemic. Becoming homebound. COVID-19’s impact on clinical trials and HTA evaluation.
How well do different countries take care of their elderly and near elderly populations? A study by Macinko et al. (2020) provides some useful statistics. Methods Population of interest. Individuals aged 50 and above sampled across 23 high- and middle-income countries. Data. The data come from 2015 or 2016 years for the following data sets:…
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have come true. Stat News reports: The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s…