Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A list of interesting articles to checkout as you head to the weekend. How America Built the World’s Most Successful Market for Generic Drugs. Reference Pricing as a Deterrent to Entry. Will Florida Medicaid cover a hospitalization in South Dakota? Will better data rescue value-based care? The return of COVID?
ISPOR recently released their award winners from their 2025 conference this May. Winners are listed below. I’m excited to announce that my podium presentation “Quantifying Treatment Value Using Alternative Health Benefit Metrics: A Case Study of Adjuvant Osimertinib for Elderly Patients with EGFR mutated NSCLC Following Resection” received an award for the Best General Podium…
Healthcare Economist was named the #4 health policy blog in 2025 by FeedSpot. My blog was also ranked as the #1 top health economics blog, the #4 public health blog, and #31 economics blog as well. I’m excited to receive this recognition!
Using data on patients with a Veterans Affairs (VA) emergency department visit for a mental health condition, Costantini et al. (2025) finds that: …longer waiting times make it more likely that patients miss their follow-up mental health visit, consequently increasing the probability that they permanently disengage from care. A 1 standard deviation increase in wait…
FDA to use AI in drug evaluation (cderGPT?) Database of hospital mergers and acquisitions. Medicaid coverage generosity and crime. Limits placed on COVID-19 vaccine access. Where are we on using AI for SLRs?
Likely ‘no‘. While CMS can consider drug prices as part of IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation, it is limited to considering only U.S. market data. Here is an excerpt from the IRA text: For purposes of negotiating the maximum fair price of a selected drug under this part with the manufacturer of the drug, the…
That is the title of my recent publication with co-authors Andrea Chung, Sachin Vadgama, Kristen Hurley, Miguel-Angel Perales, Leonard Clarkson Alsfeld, Sanjana Muthukrishnan and Anik R Patel, Gunjan L Shah, Richard T Maziarz. The abstract is below. CAR T-cell therapy has shown curative potential for patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and other malignancies,…
A press release from CMS today provides the answer: [The Department of Health and Human Services] HHS expects each manufacturer to commit to aligning US pricing for all brand products across all markets that do not currently have generic or biosimilar competition with the lowest price of a set of economic peer countries. The MFN…
The answer appears to be ‘yes’ according a recent paper written by Uchechukwu Love Anyaduba, Oluwatosin Qawiyy Orababa, Zion Faye, Nazia Rashid, Gregory Reardon and myself. The abstract is below: BackgroundCancer trials increasingly use surrogate endpoints, but it is unclear how well recurrence-free survival (RFS) or disease-free survival (DFS) specifically predict overall survival (OS) in…
Lakdawalla and Goldman. Tyler Cowen. AARP. National Pharmaceutical Council (from 2021) BIO. Adam Fein Here is a comparison of the CMS Final Rule (from 2021) vs. 2025 Trump Executive Order.