Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The answer is money, reimbursement, and incentives. Treating chronic disease gives innovators payoff over a long period of time. If innovators created a cure for that disease, they could of course charge the net present value of this same stream of payments. Health plans, patients and the media, however, are often shocked at the high sticker…
Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution notes that designing a health care system that focuses on benefits to consumers and is important, but one should not ignore how any health care system design affects the supply of health care, in particular incentives to create innovative goods and services. By greater spending on medical research, I mean not…
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” Thomas Leavitt.
The answer appears to be yes according to an NBER working paper by Galasso and Luo: We find that, on average, laws that limit the liability exposure of healthcare providers are associated with a significant reduction in medical device patenting and that the effect is predominantly driven by innovators located in the states passing the…
That is the title of an article in Eye for Pharma which interviews me about measuring value in health care. The article highlights a number of issues related to value measurement, health policy and the healthcare marketplace. The article also describes the launch of the Innovation and Value Initiative, a broad coalition of providers, payers, patient advocates,…
How does health policy and pricing affect investment in innovation? This is the research question investigated in Amy Finkelstein’s 2004 QJE paper on Static and Dynamic Effects of Health Policy. She examines three policy changes: 1991 CDC recommendation that all infants be vaccinated against Hepatitis B 1993 decision for Medicare to cover (without any copayments…
I have an article up at the Washington Post‘s In Theory blog titled How we should pay for cures, according to economics. Imagine a major medical breakthrough: a cure for Alzheimer’s. Imagine that cure not only would improve the cognitive abilities of the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s but also would give these patients…
Tomas Philipson has an interesting post in Forbes describe how value should be incorporated into the U.S. healthcare system but should be done in way suited for the American market. The American healthcare system is at a crossroads. Shifting to a system that reimburses based on value, rather than volume, of care requires changes in how we…
The answer: more competition leads to more technology adoption. This is the finding from a study by Karaca-Mandic et al. (2016). They use data from 100% Medicare claim in 2003 and 2004 as well as linked information on hospitals [American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey] and physicians [American Medical Association (AMA) Masterfile]. Competition is measured two…
In recent years, a number of organizations have developed value frameworks to assess new treatments. These organizations include the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), Memorial Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center (Drug Abacus), American Society for Clinical Oncologists (ASCO), National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), European Society of Medical Oncology (Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale).…