Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Republicans are pushing for increased use of high deductible health plans (HDHP). HDHPs have increased over time, from 29% of all employer health plans in 2021 to 33% of all employer health plans in 2025. One country that has successfully used HDHP is Singapore. A 2020 Commonweath Fund Report summarizes 3 components of the Singapore’s…
There are four primary types of uncertainty in health economic modelling: Heterogeneity: Variation between individuals that can be explained by their characteristics Stochastic uncertainty: Variation between individuals that cannot be explained by their characteristics, Parameter uncertainty: Uncertainty in the estimated values for the parameters that define the model Structural uncertainty: Uncertainty in model outcomes that…
That is the title of a paper by Longo et al. (2025). The authors use dynamic panel data on Adult Social Care (ASC) in the UK. What is ASC include: A quick explainer about ASC in the UK: In England, there are 152 upper-tier local authorities (LAs) who are responsible for publicly-funded ASC services. Access…