Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a paper by Bodnar et al. 2023. A summary of this interesting paper is below. Overview of general practitioners in the UK Under the English National Health Service (NHS) program, …patients register with a single general practice that acts as the gatekeeper to most other NHS services, including non-emergency hospital…
Last week, FDA authorized the State of Florida to import pharmaceuticals from Canada. The price of branded pharmaceuticals in the US is nearly three times the cost of identical pharmaceuticals in Canada, so this approach could save the US money. While there are some administrative issues to work out on the US side, the biggest…
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…