Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the finding from a JAMA Network Open paper by Zhang et al. (2023). The authors use 2016-2022 data from the IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Database, which claims to capture 92% of retail pharmacy prescriptions. First, fewer opioids prescriptions were made (extensive margin): During January 2016 to December 2022, the monthly surgical opioid dispensing rate…
2023 was a strong year for drug discovery. Mullard et al. (2024) report: The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 55 new drugs in 2023, as the small molecule and biologic pharmacopoeia continues to grow. This cohort is nearly 50% bigger than the new approval class of 2022, which fell below the…
It appears that health care spending as a share of GDP has leveled off. While reaching close to 20% of GDP during the pandemic, 2022 had health care spending (17.3% of GDP) more in line with pre-pandemic norms. Hartman et al. (2023) reports: Health care spending in the US grew 4.1 percent to reach $4.5 trillion in…
That is the finding from a CDC report released this month. Mortality rates fell by 24% between 2001 and 2021. Specifically, the cancer death rate for youth ages 0–19 years was 2.75 per 100,000 in 2001, but decrease to 2.10 per 100,000 in 2021. The analysis uses data including (i) cause of death data from…
Patients assigned to different primary care providers in the US have different levels of spending. This is not surprising, but to what degree is this result driven by variation in health care utilization compared to prices? A paper by Mehrotra et al. (2023) aims to answer this question using 2018 claims data from a large…
How long does it take different countries/regions to approve new medications? The US is the fastest and Europe is the slowest among selected major pharmaceutical markets according to a report by EFPIA. Moreover, while a majority (7 out of 10) of therapies in the US rely on expedited approval, in Europe less than 1 in…
Different health technology assessment bodies use different discount rates. ICER uses 3%. NICE uses 3.5%, but allows for a 1.5% discount rate as an alternative approach in certain circumstances. What does the US’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) use? A OMB press release from last week recommends that government agencies use: …2.0% for effects…
If you guessed manufacturers, you would be incorrect. At least that is according to a new study by Mattingly et al. (2023) in JAMA Health Forum. Using a sample of the 45 generic drugs with >$100m in Part D and used by >1m beneficiaries, the authors found that: …Medicare Part D spent $11.8 billion for…
That is the topic of an interesting paper by Ho (2023). Prescription drug use has reached historic highs in the United States—a trend linked to increases in medicalization, institutional factors relating to the health care and pharmaceutical industries, and population aging and growing burdens of chronic disease. Despite the high and rising prevalence of use,…
Via the Kaiser Family Foundation: In 2023, more than half (51%) of eligible Medicare beneficiaries – 30.8 million people out of 60.0 million Medicare beneficiaries with both Medicare Parts A and B – are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. Medicare Advantage enrollment as a share of the eligible Medicare population has jumped from 19% in…