Friday Links
Impact of the Great Recession on health. A loneliness epidemic? Medicaid’s increasing pressure on state budgets. Physician reimbursement to decline 3.4%. Are children spending too much time on enrichment activities?
Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Impact of the Great Recession on health. A loneliness epidemic? Medicaid’s increasing pressure on state budgets. Physician reimbursement to decline 3.4%. Are children spending too much time on enrichment activities?
That is the topic of a U.S. Senate hearing last week. One person testifying was an economist, USC Professor Darius Lakdawalla. While his full testimony is here, his key points of contention are worth reading. These include: The challenge for public policy is to sustain the pace of medical innovation while ensuring that valuable new…
When we think of utilization management (e.g., prior authorizations, step edits), we often think payers only use these for higher cost branded products including biologics. Generic drugs should have low cost sharing and limited utilization management. One question, however, is whether payers’ utilization management practices for biosimilars mirror those of biologic products, or small-molecule generics,…
That is the questioned answered in a paper by Mukherjee et al. (2023). The authors define an “HEOR study” for this paper as …real-world evidence studies that conducted a secondary/post-hoc analysis using randomized controlled trial (RCT) data, and a within-trial cost-utility analysis in which the outcome of interest was costs or PROs including preference-based utilities…
That is the topic of a recent white paper from the Innovation and Value Initiative titled “Valuing Rare Disease Treatments in Healthcare: Real Experience, Real Impact“. The report notes a number of challenges in assessing treatment value in rare disease (see my white paper “Challenges in Preserving Access to Orphan Drugs Under an HTA Framework”…
ABIM on physician certification. 70.4% of physicians worked while on vacation on a typical vacation day Is Science a public good? Healthcare job growth reached three-decade high. Is there a future for digital therapeutics?
A CMS proposed rule would expedite the prior authorization approval process. CMS summarizes key provisions of the rule as follows: Proposals include requiring implementation of a Health Level 7® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard Application Programming Interface (API) to support electronic prior authorization. They also include requirements for certain payers to include a specific reason…
That is the title of a new Health Affairs Forefront article by Peter Neumann and Joshua Cohen. An excerpt is below: One reason economic analyses may yield estimates that are too low is that they ignore the downstream declines in drug prices that occur when competitors enter the market and especially with the introduction of…
No cervical cancer cases in HPV-vaccinated women. Neuroimaging and mental health care. Syphillis cases on the rise. Dengue Fever vaccine soon to arrive? School spending: “Spending on basic infrastructure (such as HVAC) or on the removal of pollutants raises test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities raises house prices but not…
It appears changes are coming to the FDA Advisory Committee process for evaluating new drugs. The FDA is planning significant reforms to its advisory committee process, as announced by Commissioner Rob Califf. While specifics are scarce, these changes are spearheaded by Namandjé Bumpus, the FDA’s chief scientist, and newly appointed deputy commissioner.Califf noted improvements in…