Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to a Health Affairs Scholar paper by Geoffrey Joyce out this month, the answer is ‘yes’. He writes: Most PBM contracts tie their compensation to a percentage of a drug’s list price, creating a financial incentive to favor high-cost, high-rebate drugs on plan formularies at the expense of lower-cost generics and biosimilars. Furthermore, the…
That is the question that a paper by Wong et al. (2024) aims to answer. FDA use the accelerated approval (AA) pathway to expedite the availability of drugs for serious or life-threatening conditions when a drug demonstrates an effect on a surrogate endpoint that is reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit, or on a clinical…
From the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker: Most ACA Marketplace insurers are requesting premium increases in the 10-20% range for 2026. But more than a quarter (27%) of insurers are proposing premium increases of 20% or more for 2026. What individuals will pay for this insurance, however, is much higher because of the expiration of the…
Meyer and Wyse: “Medicaid Expansion Reduced Mortality” Cannon response: “If…[Medicare and Medicaid]…were drugs, regulators would pull them from the market” and “Randomized Controlled Trials of Medicare and Medicaid, Please” L.A. Times to use the Green Bay Packers ownership model? Obesity: Diet > Exercise Privacy laws for brain data.
Most health economists people know quality adjusted life years (QALYs) are. But why are they so widely used in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States? A paper by MacKillop and Sheard (2018) provides an interesting history of the QALY and is worth a read. For QALYs to be useful there first had…
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report titled “How Changes to Funding for the NIH and Changes in the FDA’s Review Times Would Affect the Development of New Drugs.” The report evaluates two scenarios: A permanent 10 percent reduction in the amount of funding that the government provides to the NIH, and…
Many people don’t understand why pharmaceuticals cost so much money. Don’t pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money? The answer is ‘yes’, but only if the drugs are successful. A paper by Wouters et al. (2024) found that: Based on data for 361 of 558 new therapeutic agents approved over the study period (median follow-up…
Yesterday, the UK government released it’s Life Sciences Sector Plan (LSSP). The British government summarized the provisions as follows: 1. Unlocking NHS data to find new cures. Up to £600 million investment to build the world’s most advanced health data system – helping scientists develop better treatments faster. 2. Speeding up clinical trials. Cutting red…
That is the title of my new paper in the Forum for Health Economics and Policy (FHEP) and the subtitle is “Estimating Insurance Value and Risk Preferences in Neurology.” This work is co-authored with Kyi-Sin Than, Jacob Fajnor, Jaehong Kim, Elizabeth Mearns, Stacey Kowal, Thomas Majda and Jakub Hlávka. First, the research uses a multiple…
On this blog we most often talk about health care issues related to chronic and acute conditions, health behaviors and public health. However, there is another dimension that is vital to health: avoiding natural disasters. Unfortunately, natural disasters appear to having an increasing impact in the US across the past decades. Between 1980-2024, 16,941 people…