Health impact of increasing access to physicians

Out recently is an interesting AEA paper by Okeke 2023, who examines a policy experiment by the Nigerian government that aimed determine whether expand access to physicians improved health outcomes. In this experiment, some communities were randomly selected to receive a new doctor. These doctors were posted to the local public health center. Prior to…

Coverage with evidence development for medical devices in Central and Eastern Europe

The value of medical devices caries with it less certainty than pharmaceuticals for a variety of reasons.  As described in Kovács et al. (2022) medical devices: often have multiple applications, frequently, undergo product modifications and during their product lifecycle, multiple incremental technological innovations take place affecting both clinical and economic consequences of their adoption into…

Adding the patient perspective to health technology assessment

Health technology assessments (HTAs) aim to measure the cost effectiveness of a given treatment or set of treatments for a specific patient populations.  Often, these assessments are conducted from the point of view of the payer–either a national health system or the individual insurer perspective.  This payer focused perspective can often focus largely on treatment costs rather…

Health Care in Malaysia

Malaysia is a middle income country (GDP per capita $26,600, about half of U.S. income levels) of 30.5 million people (about the population of New York and Ohio combined).  Life expectancy is 74.75 years, just 5 years below the U.S.  Health spending in Mayalsia is only 4% of GDP (compared to 17% of GDP in…

CER Around the World

Both the stimulus bill (i.e., The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [ARRA]) and Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act [ACA]) contain provisions to increase funding for compariative effectiveness research (CER).  According to a Deloitte Issue Brief, ARRA provided the foundation for the ACA’s newly mandated and immediately effective CER entity, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute…

Pharmaceuticals in Italy

Thomas Schael, ex-commissioner at the Public Health Authority of Naples, led the implementation of a system that produced annual drug expenditure savings of €20m.  How did he do it?  Eye for Pharma has a revealing two–part interview. The first thing Schael did to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals in Italy was to improve the efficiency…

Health Reform in China

What is health insurance like in China?  A 2011 paper by Zhong in Health Economics provides a nice overview, which I discuss in today’s post. Between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, three primary insurance schemes covered almost all Chinese citizens. Cooperative Medical System (CMS).  This program existed in 90% of Chinese villages. …