Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
No surprise, but it’s high. Chandra, Coile and Mommaerts (2023) write: The average cost of AD [Alzheimer’s Disease] drug development is estimated (based on a host of assumptions) to be $5.6 billion, largely due to high preclinical and phase 3 trial costs (Cummings, Reiber, and Kumar 2018). This number greatly exceeds R&D costs for other…
Drug development in space? MediCal lottery winner. Does raising the minimum wage increase homelessness? Surgeon General on social media. One suggestion: “Policymakers should consider…warning labels like those on cigarette cartons” Pharma companies to skip Medicare altogether?
That is the conclusion from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services National Health Expenditure Projections. The paper–published in Health Affairs—summarizes the spending changes as follows: National health expenditures are projected to grow 5.4 percent, on average, over the course of 2022–31 and to account for roughly 20 percent of the economy by the end of that…
That is the title of an article by Cascaldi-Garcia et al. (2023) in the Journal of Economic Literature. I summarize some of the key findings below. Definitions: Risk: Applies to situations in which the outcome is unknown to decision makers, but the probability distribution governing the outcome is known” Volatility. Often used synonymously with risk,…
The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) and AcademyHealth have developed a consensus document titled “A Research Framework to Understand the Full Range of Economic Impacts on Patients and Caregivers” Direct Medical Costs: Patient or caregiver costs paid to a healthcare provider or healthcare system. Non-Clinical Healthcare Costs: Costs that are a direct result of seeking…
This week ICER released a number of potential changes to their value framework. A summary of these are listed in the table below.
Merck sues to stop IRA, as many predicted. 4 ways to improve IRA price negotiations. FDA proposes new drug label for patients. Bayes Theorem explained. Stricter disability insurance impact on work and UI.
According to a paper by Garrison and Towse (2023) in Health Affairs Forefront the answer is ‘no’. I agree with them. Here is the rationale: …this request for R&D cost information reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of the regulated US and global pharmaceutical marketplace. Writing in this journal in 2004 on the pros…
In politics: He who desires to attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different…
New cell and gene therapies offer the promise of revolutionizing care for patients with genetic diseases. Many of these diseases impact kids and about a third of children in the US are insured by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The government faces a challenge: cell and gene therapies are potential breakthrough therapies…