Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus claimed that climate change is “the ultimate challenge for economics.” One could say that climate change poses a serious challenge for the health economist as well. Climate change could have negative impact on health across a variety of dimensions including: Increased pollution has negative impacts on respiratory diseaes The increased increased…
An ambitious paper by Chen et al. (2023) published last week aim to estimate the economic burden of cancer across 204 countries between 2020 and 2050 . The authors find that cancer’s economic burden is equivalent to an annual tax of 0.55% of global GDP. The full results are below. The estimated global economic cost…
When you buy a car, there is the sticker price and what you actually paid after haggling with the dealer over discounts. For pharmaceuticals, the media typically reports on list prices which are analogous to the “sticker price” for cars. However, what really matters is the net price, which is the price after discounts and…
How can we help improve the lives of children? Does this mean giving money to their families or providing in kind good or services (e.g., frees schooling, health care, food stamps, housing)? Should any cash or in-kind transfers be made unconditionally or based on some conditions (e.g., require school attendance)? Many other countries use cash…
New CMMI drug pricing models. Cell and gene therapies inundate FDA. Does cost attribute in a DCE increase respondent attention span? Physicians to unionize? Does medical marijuana reduce opioid prescribing for cancer patients? BioGPT. Guidance for Medicare Prescription Drug Inflation Rebate Program.
These are becoming increasingly common. Agrawal et al. (2022) use data between 2002-2021, and found that FDA approved: …176 new malignant hematology and oncology indications based on single-arm trials, including 116 accelerated approvals (AAs) and 60 traditional approvals. Overall, 87 approvals (49%) were for new molecular entities or original biologics and 89 (51%) were supplemental…
There is even less competition then we may have thought according to a paper out this month by Socal et al. (2023): We identified a total of 565 facilities producing 1,379 unique generic APIs across forty-two countries. India, China, and Italy were the top producers; 14 percent of APIs were manufactured in the US. About a…
Both the Inflation Reduction Act and Affordable Care Act contained language that made cost-effectiveness analysis difficult to implement, while allowing for the analysis of comparative effectiveness with respect to the relative health benefits across treatments. This leads to the natural question, how often are would reimbursement decisions based on comparative effectiveness alone be the same…
Medicare covers largely elderly individuals, the disabled, and individuals with end stage kidney disease. Medicaid covers low-income individuals. So who are dual eligibles, that qualify for both programs? The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) put out a report last year providing a summary of the…
That is a quote from a recent report by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) titled: “ALL IN: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.” It is clear that homelessness causes poor health. Life expectancy for the average American is 77 years, but people who have experienced homelessness it is only…