Healthcare Job Growth
From Charlie Bilello: Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
Month: May 2026
The rise in fabricated citations
From a Topaz et al. (2026) paper in The Lancet reviewing citations across 2.5 peer-reviewed papers in PubMed: Among 97·1 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025,…
MFN countries reduced funding for health innovation in recent decades
As people become richer, they generally spend more money on health. However, as countries become richer, do they spend more or less (relative to their GDP per capita) on health care innovation? A paper by Yu et al. (2026) looks at trends in willingness to pay thresholds between the US and countries in the most-favored…
Why don’t patients price shop for healthcare?
Stuart Figueroa provides some insights in his Incidental Economist article: To start, price shopping is inconvenient. It requires the consumer to invest time and energy in finding a provider, oftentimes having to navigate provider directories that are inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated. Price shopping is also hampered by the mere fact that health insurance is complicated and…
Are payers becoming more restrictive in their coverage of pharmaceuticals?
Let’s say you’re the CEO of a health plan. A new drug just received approval to treat patients with lung cancer. The drug’s clinical trial examined how well the the drug worked on third line (3L) patients and patients with good funcional ability (e.g., performance status ECOG score of 0 or 1). FDA approved the…
Does biosimilar entry reduce cost for patients?
Biosimilars aim to be lower cost options for biologic therapies after loss of exclusivity. A key question is whether these cost savings get passed through to patients via lower out-of-pocket costs. A paper by Dayer et al. (2026) aims to answer this question using 2011-2023 Merative MarketScan Commercial claims data. The authors observed: …significant patient…
Are drug prices value-based?
One of the central tensions in pharmaceutical policy is the gap between what a drug is worth and what it actually costs. In theory, a drug’s price should reflect its value — its ability to improve health outcomes relative to the next best alternative. In practice, list prices are set by manufacturers, net prices are shaped by opaque…