Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What is the impact of changing one treatment attribute on patient preferences for that treatment? This is a key question of interest for many patient preference studies. In practice, this is most often done by estimating the causal effect of changing one attribute of a profile while averaging over the distribution of the remaining profile…
That is the title of a paper recently published in AJMC with co-authors Suhail Thahir, Alexa Klimchak, Ivana Audhya, Lauren Sedita, and John A. Romley. The abstract is below. Objectives: To quantify the magnitude of altruism value as applied to a hypothetical new treatment for a rare, severe pediatric disease: Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Study Design: Prospective…
Should the US privatize the postal service? 4 key themes of IRA’s Part D redesign. Acemoglu: A Renewed Liberalism. In-kind vs. cash payments for long-term care insurance. RFK Jr.: “I believe that vaccines play a critical role in healthcare”
That is the questions an NBER working paper by Fleck, Heathcote, Storesletten, and Violante aims to answer. Using a variety of survey and administrative data, the authors reach the following 8 conclusions: (i) The federal tax and transfer system is progressive. (ii) State and local tax and transfer systems are close to proportional, on average.…
Chuanzi Yue and Marisa Miraldo argue in a recent Health Affairs Forefront piece that the answer is ‘yes’, but I am highly skeptical of their claim. Will IRA cause firms to allocate funds from marketing to R&D? One point they make is that the IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program will reduce pharmaceutical expenses on…
How has President Trump’s recent executive orders reshaped the US healthcare system? Below, I summarize the healthcare-related Executive Orders that were released this week: ACA premium subsidies will be reduced: Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order that led to longer enrollment periods for Affordable Care Act plans in most states. In short, in 2021, temporary subsidies…
That is according to the FDA. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery summarizes the progress to date as follows. The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) approved 57 new therapeutic drugs (NTD) in 2024. This is slightly above the average of 53 NTDs per year for 2014–2024,…
From the CMS document “Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program: Selected Drugs for Initial Price Applicability Year 2027“: On January 17, 2025, CMS announced the selection of the below list of 15 drugs covered under Medicare Part D for the second cycle of negotiations (initial price applicability year 2027), based on total gross covered prescription drug…
One of the greatest baseball announcers of all time passed away today. Bob Uecker. The voice of the Milwaukee Brewers. Mr. Baseball. He was certainly the ‘soundtrack to summer’ growing up in Wisconsin. For Brewers fans like me, his calls are those of Brewers history and lore. Brewers TV play-by-play announcer Brian Anderson recalls some…
A recent paper by Kacerek and Mattingly (2025) aims to answer why certain drugs are defined as “specialty” drugs and others are not. They first cite an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report: The OIG found that there was no standard definition in Medicaid and that Medicaid programs used more than 100 different characteristics to…