Monday Links
The principal force behind declining happiness has been… The problem of tinkering with the safety net. Market power vs. adverse selection. New COVID detector. Has Baumol’s cost disease been cured?
Month: August 2021
Capability measures to value health interventions for kids
Traditional cost-effectiveness measures measures treatment value based on how it affects your health. Health is often decomposed into longevity (i.e., survival) and quality of life while alive. However, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued that improvements in one’s life should be based on capabilities (a.k.a. opportunities, freedoms, advantages) to perform desired tasks rather than more abstract…
FDA: Why we approved Prograf based on real-world data
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Prograf (tacrolimus) in combination with other immunosuppressant drugs for the new indication of preventing organ rejection for patients who have received a lung transplant. While the FDA approving a new indication isn’t typically news, this is a noteworthy event because (i) it marks the first approval of…
Cost of drug utilization management is over $90 billion per year
Many of us who are patients have the unpleasant experience of navigating the complex world of drug utilization management. This includes determining what formulary tier a drug will be on, if there are any prior authorization requirements and what our copay will be. The burden also falls on physicians in that they need to justify…
Monday links
How consultants help hospitals with bundled payments. 76% of small businesses worried Delta variant will impede economic recovery. Scott Alexander on the FDA. Being a nurse is hard. NHS waiting times may not return to normal until 2025.
Biosimilar use in France
Like generic drugs for small molecules, biosimilars offer the hope for reducing drug prices after biologic therapies lose their patent protections. But how big an impact do biosimilars have and how comfortable are physicians with using these substitute products? A paper by Robinson and Jarrion (2021) use data from France as a case study to…
Healthcare Economist on vacation
Healthcare Economist will be out on vacation this week. Posting will resume August 9.