Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This month, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its annual report on cancer titled Global status report on cancer 2026: the future we choose together. I provide a high level Q&A summary of see key statistics. How many cancer cases were there in 2024? “In 2024, there were 20.6 million new cancer cases worldwide5 (19.5…
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…
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…
How can we characterize the epidemiology and health care resource utilization of Americans with schizophrenia? This is the question a new paper in JMCP by Parks et al. (2026) aims to answer among patients enrolled in Medicaid. The authors use Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (MSIS) Analytic Files from 2016 to 2022 and find that:…
The answer is provided by EFPIA’s annual WAIT indicator (press release, report). First, we see a large decrease in the share of pharmaceuticals fully availbity, drive by a small increase in reduced availability but a much larger increase in the number of drugs that only have a limited availability. Specifically, Historically full availability was the…
From a Mark et al. (2026) paper published in Health Affairs last week: …from 2000 through 2021, mental health and SUD nominal spending grew from $40.9 billion to $139.6 billion. Mental health and SUD accounted for 4.5 percent of all medical services spending in 2000 and 5.5 percent in 2021. Real per capita mental health and SUD spending grew…
It turns out the answer is Medicare Advantage plans according to a KFF analysis released today. However the reason why Medicare Advantage is more profitable may not be obvious: At the end of 2024, gross margins per enrollee ranged from $608 in the Medicaid managed care market to $1,655 in the Medicare Advantage market. Gross…
That is according to the 2024 national health expenditure data published in Health Affairs last week (Hartman et al. 2026). Here is the abstract: Health care spending in the US reached $5.3 trillion and increased 7.2 percent in 2024, similar to growth of 7.4 percent in 2023, as increased demand for health care influenced this two-year trend. As…
Perhaps at least according to Tyler Cowen. Here is an excerpt from his Conversation with Dan Wang: WANG: …health care is what, 20% of the American GDP?COWEN: 17 point something. That’s a lot, right?WANG: That’s a lot. That feels too high to me. I feel like we should be ringing better efficiencies out here.COWEN: It seems not high enough,…
Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the results from the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program for Initial Price Applicability Year (IPAY) 2027 (press release). What was the average reduction in drug prices? Across the 15 drugs included in the 2027 negotiation, on average, drug prices fell by 62% (median: 63%); accounting…