Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Let’s say that you have an international clinical trial that shows a new drug (SuperDrug) perform better than the previous standard of care (OldDrug). Also assume that individuals with a specific comorbidity–let’s call it EF–respond less well to the SuperDrug treatment. If you live in a country where comorbidity EF is common, how well do…
That is the news according to a report in Healthcare Dive. Blue Shield of California…will drop CVS Caremark as the sole manager of its pharmacy benefits. In Caremark’s place, Blue Shield of California will contract out the job to five separate companies…Blue Shield of California, or BSCA, expects to save $500 million a year from…
An interesting paper by Cooper and Kegel (2023) in AEJ: Microeconomics finds that using teams (rather then individuals) in the prisoner’s dilemma game is more likely to result in choosing to cooperate than would be the case if individuals playing each other. We compare behavior of two person teams with individuals in indefinitely repeated prisoner…
Cato approach to health reform. Water quality in rural America. Benefits of vaccinating pregnant mothers. The real cost of weight loss drugs. Health care worker burnout.
If you guessed manufacturers, you would be incorrect. At least that is according to a new study by Mattingly et al. (2023) in JAMA Health Forum. Using a sample of the 45 generic drugs with >$100m in Part D and used by >1m beneficiaries, the authors found that: …Medicare Part D spent $11.8 billion for…
That is the title from an interesting paper by Andreyeva et al. (2023). The abstract is below: Between 2000 and 2020, the share of US hospital bed capacity under multi-unit firms (systems) increased from 58% to 81% – a rapid corporatization of a sector with $1.3 trillion in annual spend. However, little is known about…
That is the title of my new paper out in ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research. This work was done with co-authors Kyi-Sin Than, Anmol Kanotra, Kirk W Kerr, Katie N Robinson, Michael C Willey. The abstract is below. Objective: To measure the economic impact of conditionally essential amino acids (CEAA) among patients with operative treatment for fractures.Methods: A…
That is the topic of an interesting paper by Ho (2023). Prescription drug use has reached historic highs in the United States—a trend linked to increases in medicalization, institutional factors relating to the health care and pharmaceutical industries, and population aging and growing burdens of chronic disease. Despite the high and rising prevalence of use,…
Independent pharmacies view of PBMs. Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Assigning homework with ChatGPT. Honest aging. International travel and the spread of COVID. Do Tobacco-21 laws work?
A Health Affairs Forefront paper by researchers Melanie Whittington, Peter Neumann, Joshua Cohen, and Jonathan Campbell makes a compelling case for incorporating drug price dynamics into cost effectiveness analysis. The first questions many people may have is ‘how do drug prices usually change over time?’ A drug’s net price often increases following launch and may…