Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the topic of a JAMA Health Forum article by my USC colleagues Dana Goldman and Erin Trish. In it, the note that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) does good work, but the scope of their analysis is limited. CBO only estimates the impact on policies on government budgets; CBO’s remit does not evaluate…
The answer is provided by FDA’s 2025 Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report. The report covers 46 novel drug approvals and roughly 26,000 participants across pivotal trials, organized by therapeutic area rather than a single aggregate narrative. Half (23 out of 46) of these approvals were for the treatment of rare or orphan diseases (i.e., diseases…
Today I attended the very interesting ISPOR Health Policy Leadership Exchange (HPLE) in Washington DC on the topic of Most Favored Nation (MFN). There were a number of important points made and I’ll summarize a few of them. First, US drug prices are much higher than in other OECD countries. An ASPE report from 2024…
Fiore et al. (2026) just released their annual national health expenditure projections in Health Affairs. I summarize some of the key findings in Q&A format. How much is the US currently spending on health care? $5.7 trillion. This is represents an increase in healthcare spending as a share of GDP from 18.0% in 2024 to…
That is the title of my new Health Affairs Forefront piece out today with Lou Garrison and Richard Xie. An excerpt from the article is below: United States policy makers increasingly argue that Americans pay too much for prescription drugs. In a recent report, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee minority staff contended…
That is the title of a Journal of Economic Perspectives article by Martin Gaynor and Amanda Starc (2026). The article provides an overview of the current levels of competition in US health insurance markets, considers theoretic issues in what levels of competition are optimal, what empirical studies have found of the impact of competition and…
That is the title of a recent white paper written by myself and Kristy Piccinini alongside a team from the Health and Fitness Association (Greta Wagner, Amy Bantham, Ken Griffin, Richard Beddie, Zach Weston, Cameron Saunders). Below is an excerpt: In recent years, glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists have emerged as a transformative treatment option, enabling…
GLP-1 and cancer. Healthcare mortgages for gene therapies. Argentia vs. Chile: battle of the economies. Medicaid work rules explained. Watch the World Cup in English or en Español?
When health economics emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 1960s, mainstream academic and policy paradigms widely presumed that competitive market mechanisms were structurally incompatible with medical delivery. Influenced by foundational ideas like Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 landmark paper emphasizing the pervasive friction of clinical uncertainty, early experts argued that society had to look almost…
From the very interesting book Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. To some people, a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine–a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s…