Category: Current Events

Do Medicare Advantage beneficiaries understand their plan? How much are doctors paid in England? Health insurance exchanges and reinsurance. Utilization management for Part D cancer drugs. “340B Program participation has not demonstrated improved quality of inpatient care among Medicaid or uninsured patients.” Economic Incentive for timely completion of confirmatory clinical trials.

Value-based care and operational context. Miss diagnosis. Explaining variation in health care costs: ⅘ utilization, ⅕ prices. All of Us. Enneagrams.

Depopulation in Japan: “there are now more gangsters in their 70s than in their 20” Expanding primary care in rural areas. “…underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest” Returns from IRS tax audits across the income distribution Large language models for statisticians.

Income and health care expenditures in Canada. Opioids vs. placebo. Why do cancer cells have extra chromosomes. Trends in healthy lifestyles. Microeconomics and cell biology. Drivers of increased suicide rates in the US over the past 2 decades. Barrier to biosimilar uptake: 340B. Peterson Health Technology Institute launched. Sex education and social media.

Which HVBP components matter for patients choosing a hospital? Conflict of interest for RVU determination. How are payers de-risking cell and gene therapy cost (hint: stop-loss insurance) Over-the-counter birth control pill approved. ICER to advise CMS on MFP calculation?

Why is it so hard for academic medical centers to succeed in value-based care? I think the “Better Care Plan” is more focused on cost reduction than actually ‘better care’. Peer effects and generic drug purchases. Using cosmic rays. SLR on value-based purchasing. Should there be a sales tax on diapers? Supreme Court strikes down…

Drug shortages. Smart toilet seat to monitor health.   “The honesty paper is even more dishonest than we thought.” Criteria for payer coverage of DTx. IRA fines are starting. U.S. Chamber of Commerce sues to stop IRA price negotiation. 7% of clinical text messages contain an emoji. US annual primary care spending: $439/person.

Drug development in space? MediCal lottery winner. Does raising the minimum wage increase homelessness? Surgeon General on social media. One suggestion: “Policymakers should consider…warning labels like those on cigarette cartons” Pharma companies to skip Medicare altogether?

Merck sues to stop IRA, as many predicted. 4 ways to improve IRA price negotiations. FDA proposes new drug label for patients. Bayes Theorem explained. Stricter disability insurance impact on work and UI.

Benefits from quality competition in health care? Impact of debt ceiling deal on health programs. Signals that are so clear you don’t need statistics, and signals that are so weak that statistical analysis can’t help. Health equity impact of sickle cell gene therapy. Primer on drug development from Derek Lowe. Central Limit Theorem explained.