Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a recent paper by Schneider and Sutter (2026). While many people are familiar with the concept of risk aversion, the dispersion of outcomes (i.e., risk) is not the only thing that matters. The skewness of distribution (prudence) and risk in the tails of the distribution (temperance) matters. For instance, prudent…
Clinical trials focus in-sample (direct) effect of vaccines on health outcomes (e.g., decrease in illness, hospitalization, emergency department use, and death). Typically, however, clinical trials do not test whether the vaccines reduce transmission. FDA do not require this as it would be logistically challenging and costly to estimate indirect effects of vaccination within a clinical…
Rural Emergency Hospitals (REHs) are a new Medicare provider type created to preserve essential emergency and outpatient access in rural communities where low inpatient volume makes full-service hospitals financially unsustainable. They receive enhanced outpatient payments and a fixed monthly facility payment in exchange for forgoing acute inpatient care. CMS has an REH fact sheet that…
That is the title of a helpful article by Karnon and Haji Ali Afzali (Pharmacoeconomics 2014) with a subtitle A Review and Critique of the Costs and Benefits of DES. The paper starts by highlighting the 3 most common types of models: decision trees, Markovian cohort models, and individual level models. Decisions trees are useful…
FDA Qualifies First AI Drug Development Tool in MASH. No impact of Medicaid on crime rates. “The life of an artist is…” Elasticity of disability insurance (DI) takeup to DI generosity: 1.26 Do it anyway.
In my latest Guest Column in The Evidence Base, II am joined by my colleague Tiago Beck as we examine how global pricing reforms are reshaping the European pharmaceutical landscape. Building on their session at ISPOR Europe 2025, the column explores the growing tension between EU access ambitions and international policy pressures – offering a…
From Zhu et al. (2025) in Health Affairs: Primary care clinicians have expressed growing interest in concierge and direct primary care practices, which often feature smaller patient panels and greater clinical autonomy compared with traditional primary care models. We assessed practice and workforce characteristics using a national sample of concierge and direct primary care practices…
This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Joe Paduda’s Managed Care Matters. My article on Singapore’s health care system is highlighted, but check out the whole thing!
As I do every year, here are the books I read and enjoyed this year. Non-fiction. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. This is probably not the most ‘fun’ book I read for the year, but it is the one that is likely to have the biggest…
That is the question asked in a recent Health Affairs Forefront article by Peter Neumann, Josh Cohen, Sean Sullivan and Feng Xie. They compare the CMS negotiated prices for Initial Price Applicability Year (IPAY) 2027 against value-based prices (using QALYs) from the Tufts Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) Registry. The authors found that cost-effectiveness estimates varied among…