Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This is a few years old, but still very relevant. It’s from a speech by former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on March 7, 2018 titled “Capturing the Benefits of Competition for Patients“ Patients shouldn’t be penalized by their biology if they need a drug that isn’t on formulary. Patients shouldn’t face exorbitant out of pocket…
How to deliver personalized therapies. Survival curve…for disk drives? Value-based contracts 2009-2019. FTC Chair interview. A pharmacist’s $180m fraud.
The book The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs is a fantastic book for individuals interested in understanding why value-based drug pricing makes sense. It is a bit more technical and more detailed than the average health policy book, but there are few formulas or detailed methodological explanations. Rather, the book provides a…
Most people know what accuracy means. Find out how many guesses you made and how many of those guesses you got correct. In the case of a diagnostic test, this is simply the number of correct answers (true positives plus true negatives) divided by the total number of answers (true positives + false positives +…
That is the title of an editorial by Ramanan Laxminarayan published in The Lancet this week. Part of the rationale from this commentary is a recent study also published this week from the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (2022). Undertaking a systematic review of the mortality impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) the authors find: …there were an…
How should you report the methodology, results and limitations of your economic model? One of the most commonly used approaches is the Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) checklist. CHEERS was developed in 2013 (Husereau et al. 2013) and a new version has been developed this year (Husereau et al. 2022). Below are the…
Pharma bro: guilty. Douthat: “How Being Sick Changed My Health Care Views”. GAVI: $150m for malaria vaccine roll-out in sub-Saharan Africa Falling drug prices? Will CMS ban PBM direct and indirect remuneration (DIR) fees? Will Democrats deliver on their health care promises?
An interesting article in Modern Healthcare reviews some discussion at a recent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) meeting. The first issue is that the pool of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries is shrinking, at least on a relative basis. As Medicare Advantage grows each year, population-based alternative payment models like accountable care organizations are left with a…
Over time, physicians are less likely to operate in solo or small group practices. In fact, the share of physician-owned practices has fallen below 50% in recent years. A key question then is how does a physician’s environment or the group they have join affect their practice patterns? Previous research has found that a physician’s…