Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Today teams in the National Football League (NFL) made their final roster cuts. In most years, your ability to make the final roster of an NFL team is dependent on one factor: how well can you play football. This year, however, some teams used additional criteria to determine whether a player made the team. ESPN…
It stands to reason that policies that aim to reduce drug prices or squeeze life science companies profits are likely to decrease incentives to finance the research and development needed to bring a drug to market. Previous estimates claim that bringing a new drug to market may cost over $2 billion, and life science companies…
That is the title of a recent commentary published in the Journal of Clinical Pathways with my colleague David Gruber. New digital technologies have the potential to greatly improve our healthcare system on multiple fronts. Telemedicine allowed many patients to communicate with their doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic; during the height of the pandemic, 30% of…
Co-pays for COVID hospitalizations. Impact of price negotiations on Part D premiums. Accelerated Approval and Value-Based Pricing? Halo Health CEO interview. Living in LA.
An interesting result from Courbage and Peter (2021): …uncertainty about the probability of side effects and the efficacy of the vaccine always reduces take-up under ambiguity aversion. However, uncertainty about the underlying disease, being the probability of sickness or the probability of a severe course of disease, may either encourage or discourage vaccination. Because vaccination…
In 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Hospital-Acquired Conditions Present on Admission (HAC-POA) program. The goal of this program was to reduce the frequency of high-cost complications among Medicare beneficiaries. The mandatory program penalized hospitals as it would no longer reimburse them for treating of preventable complications that developed during…
That is the title from a study from Lee and Bagley (2011). They examine the potential impact of direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) and the impact of physicians decisions not to prescribe a patient-preferred drug on patient retention. A total of 818 of 2,988 participants in a national telephone survey (27.4%) who had received DTCA…
An interesting paper from Kevin Chiu in the Journal of Health Economics looks at the relationship between certificate of need laws and health outcomes: Certificate of need (CON) regulations requires that health care providers obtain state approval before offering a new service or expanding existing facilities. The purported goal of CON regulations is to reduce…
That is the title of an article published in Pharmaceutical Technology today. I am quoted extensively. For instance, President Biden proposes to cap drug prices at genera rates of inflation. The article highlights some limits this would pose to value-based pricing that could evolve over time: Shafrin also says while Biden’s plan to penalise companies…
For years, Medicare and other payers have used quality measures to evaluate the quality of care patients receive at various types of providers settings (e.g., hospital, home health agencies, skilled nursing homes). For some payers, higher quality scores/higher star ratings lead to direct increases in reimbursement through a value-based purchasing arrangement. Typically, value-based payment systems…