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Social return on investment. Economic impact of health inequity. CDC’s $3 billion investment. 2022 AEA Awards. Health Affairs: top podcasts of 2022.
Author: Jason Shafrin
Reducing the bias from on the inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW)
When using observational data, assignment to a treatment group is non-random and causal inference may be difficult. One common approach to addressing this is propensity score weighting where the propensity score is the probability that a person is assigned to the treatment arm given their observable characteristics. This propensity is often estimated using a logistic…
The evolution of PBMs over the past 2 decades
A ViewPoint by Richman and Adashi in JAMA this week provides a nice overview of the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) marketplaces as well as some considerations for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to consider. Below I summarize some of the developments in the PBM market in recent decades. Of particular note is that PBMs have…
Why was there a slowdown in Medicare spending growth over the past decade?
That is the question posed by Buntin et al. (2022). The authors used data from the 2007-2018 Medicare Master Beneficiary Summary File and then ran a regression adjustment to control for patient demographics (i.e., age, sex), number of chronic conditions (none, 1-3, ≥4), and whether the individual had Part A or Parts A and B…
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Options for CMS price negotiation. Magic mushroom medicine. CBO’s options for reducing provider reimbursement. Orthopedic surgeons and private equity. New Alzheimer’s drug. Value-based payment and US health spending.
What was the impact of regulating markups for US health insurance?
Part of the Affordable Care Act mandated a medical loss ratio (MLR) for health plans in the individual and small group markets. What this means is that if the MLR is 80% and insurers charge $100 in premiums, plan enrollees must receive $80 in services on average. If they do not (say they only receive…
2022 Publications
As we have turned the leaf to 2023, I figured I’d share the publications I had last year: Publications Forma F, Chiu K, Shafrin J, Boskovic DH, Veeranki SP. Are caregivers ready for digital? Caregiver preferences for health technology tools to monitor medication adherence among patients with serious mental illness. Digital health. 2022 Mar;8:20552076221084472. Jackisch…
Impact of medication cost-sharing on adherence, clinical outcomes, health care utilization, and costs
This is the paraphrased title of a paper by Fusco et al. (2023). The authors conduct a systematic literature review of studies published between 2010 and 2020 and find that among the 79 articles screened: The majority of publications found that, regardless of disease area, increased cost-sharing was associated with worse adherence, persistence, or discontinuation.…
Quotations of the Day
‘Seek Simplicity . . . and Distrust It’ Alfred North Whitehead And a second… There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene: An Intimate History
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Nursing home administrators opinions on COVID-19 Home births on the rise. Physician work-life balance: 2001-2021 Cross country comparison: Health financing and health outcomes Top scientific advances of 2022.