Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
EndPoints notes that the Most Favored Nation Executive Order has led some large pharmaceutical firms to make two changes: (i) start charging Europeans the same price as the US, and (ii) start selling more products direct to consumer (a.k.a. ‘pharm to table‘) AbbVie, Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim each joined their peers in making price-related concessions…
That is the title of a new paper out in Value in Health with co-authors Jaehong Kim, Jacob Fajnor, Kyi-Sin Than, Elizabeth S. Mearns , Stacey L. Kowal, Thomas Majda and Jakub P. Hlávka PhD. The abstract is below. Objectives To quantify how incorporating patient risk preferences and severity adjustments affect the value of a…
That is the title of a recent paper by Gao, Kim, and Sevilir (2025). The authors examine 1218 hospital merger and acquisition (M&A) deals in the hospital industry between 2001 and 2008. The authors focus solely on M&A deals with for-profit entities as they argue that they want to examine whether private equity (PE) specifically…
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and most private payers in the U.S. have accepted the NCCN guidelines as a mandated reference to determine payment for “off‐label” use of anticancer drugs that are not approved for the specific indication by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Thus, a key question is what types of…
Should health technology assessment (HTA) processes consider using distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA) to incorporate technology impacts on inequality? Some say ‘yes’ and some say ‘no’. Let’s take a look at both sides. No In a Letter to the Editor in Value in Health, Sreeram Ramagopalan noted that NICE currently has a number of concerns…
Many policymakers aim to reduce health disparities across groups. In fact, the distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA) approach aims to incorporate treatment value based on the extent to which they reduce inequality. However, what types of inequality are we trying to reduce: ex-post or ex-ante? Ex post inequality means reducing inequality of outcomes at a…
What is Double descent. Repeal of Noneconomic Damage Caps and Medical Malpractice Insurance Premiums. Reform of FDA use of external experts? Deep learning for solving economic models. Did RFK Jr. make former CDC Chief roll back vaccine policies without evidence?
In the HEOR world, you hear a lot about innovation. However, how can we measure innovation? The easiest way is to count the number of new drugs. However, ten “me too” products may be considered less innovative than a single product that cures a disease. An essay by Sukhun Kang in The Incidental Economist conducted…
The free online book R for Health Technology Assessment has the answer: Markov models are characterised by a memoryless property called the Markov assumption or Markov property. Under the Markov assumption, movement of an individual from their current health state to a future one, conditional on both past and current health states, depends only on…
Recently I read the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Why nations fail is of course is a very important question, but one economists often shy away from because it is so multifaceted. In this book, however, the authors argue that one sufficient…