Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It seems like everything just gets more and more expensive. But are prices for medical care declining? Cutler et al. (1998) found in seminal paper “Are medical prices declining? Evidence for heart attack treatments” that while unadjusted prices of medical care were in fact rising, quality-adjusted health care costs actually were falling. In my own…
Based on one study from Sweden, the answer is ‘no’. A paper by Johansson and Svensson (2022) use data from Sweden on regional variation in drug spending. First, some background on the Swedish approach for prescription drugs spending. The Swedish national health service offers universal coverage for all residents. The system is decentralized in 21…
CPO: Chief Psychiatric Officer. Maximizing policy impact. Hospice and private equity. Stats on maternal mortality. Food price inflation and health.
How have medical expenditures varied over time and across states? That is the question being asked by Johnson et al. (2022) in a recent Health Affairs paper. The authors use State Health Expenditure Accounts data between 1999-2014 and then extrapolate these trends forward with a regression-based approach to predict State spending through 2019. Using this…
An article from the Health Affairs forefront article from Ho and Vertinsky (2022) argues ‘yes’, but the use of any such such information for cost-based pricing is short-sighted. The Ho and Vertinsky say drug cost disclosure would be useful because (i) currently there is little information on the cost of drug development, (ii) it is…