Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Although the high cost of pharmaceuticals is often in the news, these costs are offset by improved health benefits. However, it may not be clear the extent to which new pharmaceutical products lead to improved health at the national level. A paper by Lichtenberg (2018) aims to examine this question looking at the introduction of…
An interesting article from Longreads on dealing with a grandmother’s terminal illness in China. Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to…
Innovation in health care often improves quality but also increases cost. That is not always the case. Consider the case of an innovative Bangladeshi physician who was interested in improving care for patients with pneumonia who could not afford the $15,000 cost of the ventilators used in a developing work: However, after a second piece…
How can India hope to afford expanding health care coverage to half a billion people? The answer is that access to care may be restricted. As The Wire reports: India is embarking on covering 500 million people with state-sponsored health insurance. At this massive scale, the potential for huge distortions is real. The question is…
You may think you know single payer systems, but do you really? Last week, the NHS celebrated 70 years of existence. The Guardian has an interactive article that you can use to guess how health care in England has changed over the past 70 years. I encourage you to read the article and test your…
Last weekend, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) turned 70. NHS is a protocolical single payer system. Whereas Canada is a single payer system, provinces rather than the federal government makes most decisions and providers (i.e., hospitals and physicians) are private, for-profit businesses. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, both providers and health…
Drugs known as “orphan” drugs are those used to treat rare disease. However, how “rare” is rare disease? In Europe, a rare disease is one affecting 5 or fewer people per 10,000 residents. In the U.S. this figure is less than one in every 1,500 residents. Although each rare disease is–by definition–rare, about 350 million…
Stereotypically, the U.S. health system is seen as one that is expensive and inefficient, but one where patients do get the fastest access to new innovation. However, does that prove true in reality? A paper by Zhang et al. (2017) attempts to answer this question by looking at 45 oncology drugs approved by the FDA…
A paper in JAMA by Papanicolas, Woskie and Jha (2018) try to answer the question. One reason could be that Americans are less healthy than people in other countries. On the one hand, Americans do have the highest rate of obesity in the world; on the other hand, smoking rates are among the lowest. Another…
Located in South America, Peru is almost twice the size of Texas and has 31 million people. About one third of these live along the coast, largely in Lima. About half of the population–largely Amerinidan population–live in the Andean highlands, with the rest spread on the eastern slopes of the Andes and the adjoining rainforest. …