Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
I just came across a nice overview article titled The financial ecosystem of pharmaceutical R&D. The white paper was developed for the Netherlands government and provides an overview of the drug development process and how (and by whom) it is financed. The white paper answers the following questions: What do different players do within the…
These may or may not be published in 2023, but I read them this year. Fiction Too Like the Lightning and The Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. These are two books in the Terra Incognita series. These were the best books I read of the year by far. The world building is great. There is…
Such are the prosaic problems of the modern traveller. The transport part takes no time at all these days; it is the bureaucracy that is interminable. We are constantly being told that we live in a world without borders, in a globalized age, but only if you have the right passport and the right papers.…
Why does a $7000 drug sell more than an identical $1000 drug? New ViH editor-in-chief. PACT Act explained. Costs of elder care soar. AI discovers new class of antibiotics.
The term “Carer QALY” was coined in a paper by Mott et al. (2023) and is identified as the case where “it is possible for an effective treatment that provides survival gains (with relatively little or no QOL gain) to appear less effective than the comparators when carer QOL is considered.” While the term “Carer…
That is the question asked by a recent NBER working paper by Chandra et al. (2023). This question is important for a variety of reasons. First, quality measure data collection is expensive. Saraswathula et al. 2023 found that Johns Hopkins Hospital had to report 162 unique quality metrics, and the cost for collecting these data…
It appears that health care spending as a share of GDP has leveled off. While reaching close to 20% of GDP during the pandemic, 2022 had health care spending (17.3% of GDP) more in line with pre-pandemic norms. Hartman et al. (2023) reports: Health care spending in the US grew 4.1 percent to reach $4.5 trillion in…
According to a paper by Miljković et al. (2023), the answer is ‘no‘. The authors examine oncology treatments with FDA approvals between 2015 and 2020 and identify average wholesale prices from Redbook. Drugs were classified into three categories: (i) first approval of a new mechanism of action compound, (ii) next-in-class approval regardless the tumor type,…
Hallucination as an LLM feature. Impact of HPSA. FDA global drug inspections: before and after COVID. Optum employs(?) more doctors than any other organization Cause of morning sickness discovered.
…well, real interest at least. While in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic have seen nominal interest rates rising, in the long run real (i.e., inflation adjusted) interest rates are falling. A NBER working paper by Obstfeld (2023) provides compelling evidence of this trend. Current real interest rates are likely somewhere in the 1%-2% range.…