Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Gene editing without CRISPR? RCTs in economics. Claude and GTP4o on bias-adjusted nearest neighbor matching. Opioid prescriptions falling in workers comp. Since 2010, 149 rural hospitals have closed. Digital Health startups raise $1.1b in Q1 2024.
The good news: drug shortages in 2023 were down in the US from their recent peak between 2010 to 2012. The bad news: Drug shortages in 2023 were the highest they have been since 2012. These findings are from an FDA Report to Congress. Of note, shortages for biologic drugs (governed by CBER) increased a…
Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory posit that individuals have loss aversion. What is loss aversion? It means that individuals experience losses more intensely than gains of the same magnitude; for instance, the psychological impact of losing a certain amount of money is greater than the pleasure derived from gaining that same amount. A key question…
Cohen (2024) argues that health economists should start using 2% discount rates for health economic models. Why is that? I summarize the article below. First, Cohen discusses two different methods for estimating discount rates. Ramsey equation. This approach consider 4 factors: pure time preference, catastrophic risk, wealth effect, and macroeconomic risk. The first 3 factors…
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released projections of US health insurance levels between 2024 and 2034. In the Hale et al. (2024) study, CBO estimates that: …92.3 percent of the US population, or 316 million people, have coverage in 2024, and 7.7 percent, or 26 million, are uninsured. The uninsured share of the population…
I will be on vacation for the next week or so. Posts will resume on June 20th.
Why is NIH funding small trials? (there’s a good reason!) First bird flu death in humans. Employee responses to CEO activism. How rich were the rich? ‘Hot hand’ and fantasy baseball.
Why is it so hard to estimate the value of orphan drugs indicated for the treatment of rare diseases? There are a variety of reasons, but a scoping review by Grand et al. (2024) provides a nice summary of these issues. Key challenges include small sample sizes for nearly all parameters and lack of data…
Very interesting article from Sampson, Parkin and Devlin (2024). Hard to summarize but worth a read. I have two excerpts below. The first describes the role of death in QALY calculations. The value attributed to ‘dead’ cannot affect the QALYs that are gained in any context; by definition, no QALYs can be generated by a…
Delays in drug approvals cost pharmaceutical firms money. These costs include both lost sales as well as additional cost if clinical trials need to span a longer duration. While these facts are not in doubt, a key question is how much do delays in approval cost firms? A paper by Smith, DiMasi and Getz (2024)…