Friday Links
“NHS will pay diet apps who help to slim patients with weight-loss drugs” AI is creating new math. Denmark economy and Novo Nordisk. CDC resignations continue. Employer strategies for reference-based pricing of provider reimbursement.
Month: August 2025
Impact of cousin marriage on life expectancy
From Hwang, Jakob and Squires (2025) in AER: Insights: Cousin marriage rates are high in many countries today. While previous studies have documented increased risks of infant and child mortality, we provide the first estimate of the effect of such marriages on life expectancy throughout adulthood. By studying couples married over a century ago, we…
Do people like to daydream?
Not really. At least according a study by Wilson et al. 2025 in Science. In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to…
CMS doesn’t consider QALYs – What’s a health economist to do?
That is the title of my article out today in The Evidence Base. Here is an excerpt: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are now setting drug prices under the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program. Unlike other health technology assessment (HTA) bodies worldwide, however, CMS will not consider quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) when setting drug…
CMMI’s New Strategic Direction
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) recently released a new strategy to “Make America Healthy Again.” The strategy includes: Promoting evidence-based prevention Empowering people to achieve their health goals Driving choice and competition for people A Health Affairs Forefront article from Joshua M. Liao notes three broad goals: increasing patient engagement, better leveraging…
What makes patients switch doctors?
A paper by Dillibe et al. (2025), examined primary data obtained from 555 US-based patients who reported switching providers between 2018 and 2022. To analyze these data, the authors used critical incident technique (CIT). CIT is implemented by asking participants to recall and describe specific events or behaviors that contributed to important outcomes (in this…
Alcohol: Changing use and perceptions
Conventional wisdom holds that alcohol use is part of American culture…but perhaps this is changing. According to a Gallup poll released last week, not only is alcohol use declining but there is an increasing perception that alcohol use is not good for you. While a majority of Americans (54%) still use alcohol, drinking rates are…
Impact of Medicare Part B on pharmaceutical price growth
Does Medicare Part B increase or decrease the prices of physician-administered drugs relative to physician-administered drugs covered by private insurance? That is the question a paper by Acquatella, Ericson and Starc (2023) aim to answer. Before we answer that question, we first need to understand how Part B works, how physicians are reimbursed, and how…
Will most favored nation reduce drug prices in the US…or raise prices in Europe?
The answer seems to be the latter. The Times (UK) reports. Eli Lilly, the US-based manufacturer of Mounjaro, said it was hiking the UK list price for the medication from September 1 to bring it in line with other nations…Eli Lilly is increasing the amount it charges pharmacies. The rate for a middle-sized 5mg dose…
President Trump’s demand letter: What is he asking pharmaceutical companies to do?
On July 31, President Trump sent letters to some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world (AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Regeneron, and Sanofi) asking them to fundamentally change drug pricing in the US. What was…