Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In recent years, the US government has had a number of proposals which aim to lower drug prices by linking US drug prices to the prices in other developed countries. This process is known as international reference pricing (IRP). A paper by Sullivan et al. (2022) explains: Federal legislative proposals to address global pricing differences…
As I do every year on Memorial Day, I like to review recent news articles surrounding health care for veterans. Corruption: On the negative side, we have news of a former VA employee stealing HIV medication. A former pharmacy procurement technician was sentenced today to 57 months in prison for stealing prescription HIV medications from…
This is my 5,000th post at Healthcare Economist. I started this blog in January 2006 and my first post had the very creative title of “Welcome!!!” Since that time I finished my PhD, did work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services, conducted research on behalf of some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in…
Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in the US, just behind heart failure. Yet in recent years, we have seen that improved prevention, screening and treatment has helped to avert 3.5 million deaths in the US over the past 3 decades. Despite these gains, we do see that cancer death rates are highly…
Recently the CBO published a report compared the rates public and private insurers pay to hospitals for inpatient services, for services at hospital outpatient departments (HOPD), and at ambulatory surgical centers (ASC). A recent RAND report aims to do a similar exercise but contributes to the literature by using updated data from more states, allowing…
Last month, ICER updated their protocol for identifying drugs that have unsupported price increases (UPI). Not only is ICER examining rising drug prices, but California and Vermont now have laws tracking substantial drug price increases, requiring drug manufacturers to submit information that might justify increases above a certain threshold. ICER says that the UPI reports…
REITs own 3% of all hospitals and 12% of all skilled nursing facilities. DCE methods: Separating attribute non-attendance from taste heterogeneity. Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). Remote work and home prices. Legislation to combat prior authorization delays.
What considerations beyond quality adjusted life years and cost should be considered when evaluating gene therapies? A panel from ISPOR provided just such a discussion. As summarized an ISPOR’s Value and Outcomes Spotlight article titled “Can Pharmaceutical Pricing Move Beyond Cost QALY for Value Consideration?“, Michael F. Drummond pointed out that: …there are other values…
The value of medical devices caries with it less certainty than pharmaceuticals for a variety of reasons. As described in Kovács et al. (2022) medical devices: often have multiple applications, frequently, undergo product modifications and during their product lifecycle, multiple incremental technological innovations take place affecting both clinical and economic consequences of their adoption into…
Will telehealth widen or reduce health disparities? Telehealth may make it easier for individuals who lack transportation to get access to medical care; on the other hand, those without high-speed internet or good cell phone connections could be disadvantaged. In a recent report, NCQA examined the future of telehealth and examined how to make sure…