Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report titled “Pharmacy Benefit Managers: The Powerful Middlemen Inflating Drug Costs and Squeezing Main Street Pharmacies.” While I won’t get into an analysis of the specific arguments FTC made, the report does have a number of interesting statistics and graphics on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Some…
It makes sense that more educated individuals have lower mortality rates. Better education may improve health literacy. More education can lead to higher income and and more employee health benefits (with better insurance coverage). However, does living in communities with more educated individuals impact mortality separately from whether an individual’s family is highly educated? According…
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released projections of US health insurance levels between 2024 and 2034. In the Hale et al. (2024) study, CBO estimates that: …92.3 percent of the US population, or 316 million people, have coverage in 2024, and 7.7 percent, or 26 million, are uninsured. The uninsured share of the population…
Delays in drug approvals cost pharmaceutical firms money. These costs include both lost sales as well as additional cost if clinical trials need to span a longer duration. While these facts are not in doubt, a key question is how much do delays in approval cost firms? A paper by Smith, DiMasi and Getz (2024)…
Samsung Bioepis has a Biosimilar Market Report for Q2 2024. Some key highlights: As of April 2024, the FDA has approved a total of 48 biosimilars across 15 unique biological molecules. Of the 48 approvals, 38 biosimilars have launched in the US market. In Q2 2024, 3 new biosimilars were approved in the US (Simlandi…
How did health care prices change over the past 2 decades. That is the question a paper by Papanicolas (2024) aims to answer, comparing US prices to those from Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands between 2000 and 2020. Before we get to the results, we first need to determine what types of price indices…
A great paper by Gruber et al. 2023 looks at the evolution of long-term care for ten countries: Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the United States. Long-term care is divided into three categories: institutional care, formal home care, and informal care. For the 10 countries examined, the paper finds…
Using commercial claims data between 2009-2018, a paper in Health Services Research by Lalani et al (2024) finds that: Rebates are rising as a share of cost Fewer patients have $0 out-of-pocket cost Patient out-of-pocket costs growth was 2.9x as large as net drug cost growth Specifically: List prices increased 4.4%/yr (interquartile range [IQR], 1.1%…
That is the answer Caswell-Jin et al. (2024) aim to answer. The authors used 4 cancer mortality models within CISNET for this study: Model D (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). Used to define a set of disease states and implemented analytic formulations to estimate the association of interventions on transitions between these states, as well as on…
A paper by Gupta and Akinyemiju (2024) uses SEER data to examine trends in age-adjusted cancer mortality between blacks and whites between 2000 and 2020. The authors find that: In 2000, the [age-adjusted mortality] rate was 251.7 per 100 000 population among Black individuals and 199.7 per 100 000 population among White individuals, decreasing to 166.8 per…