Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to the OECD, In 2021 the U.S. spent $1,432/capita on pharmaceuticals compared to only $517/per capita in the UK. The UK’s figure was slightly higher that Poland and Norway, but less than Latvia, the Slovak Republic, Portugal and Romania. How does the UK spend so little on drugs? Many people focus on the efforts…
As individuals live longer, governments and employers are considering increasing the age at which individuals become eligible for either public or private pensions (e.g., Social Security). Why this fiscal impacts of changing the retirement age has been well-studied, the labor market and health outcomes are less well-known. A paper by Serrano-Alarcón et al. (2023) examines…
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…
That is the title of an important paper by Jonathan Gruber, Mengyun Lin & Junjian Yi. The abstract is below: The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS…
Adverse selection is a classic problem in health insurance. If you offer insurance to individuals, you may want to set the premiums based on the average price of the population you plan to cover. At this price, however, the sickest patients are the ones most likely to take up insurance and the health insurer’s expenses…
Today I’m turning this post over to some of my FTI colleagues in Europe (Antoine Mialhe, Katja Murray and Valeria Fagone among others) who helped summarize the Reform of the EU pharmaceutical legislation that the European Union (EU) adopted on April 26, 2023. The summary below is provided by the FTI Consulting team in Brussels…
In Bangladesh, seasonal floods occur due to snow melt from the Himalayas as well seasonal monsoons. How can villages in Bangladesh get health care if they don’t have a boat to transport them to regional health care centers? The answer–according to a recent article in The Economist–is that the hospital comes to them. Three hours’…
Public reporting of hospital quality of care could improve the care patients receive through at least two pathways. First, patients (or their physicians) could send patients to higher quality hospitals (i.e., the selection pathway). Alternatively, hospitals themselves could have behavioral responses to the metrics and may improve quality of care in response to public reporting…
Pham et al. (2023) uses data on regulatory decisions and health technology assessments (HTAs) in Australia, Canada, and the UK and compares them to the drugs that are FDA-approved in the US. They find that: The FDA approved 206 new drugs in 2017 through 2020, of which 162 (78.6%) were granted marketing authorization by at…
A paper by Birg (2022) aims to examine how mandatory increases in rebates for pharmaceutical products impacts the use of parallel imports. She uses a policy change from 2010 in Germany which mandated increased pharmaceutical rebates to identify the impact of this change. What are parallel imports? Parallel imports are drugs that are imported from…