Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is a question considered in the latest edition of The Economist. In the article “How British science came to the rescue“, the magazine notes that COVID-19 had highlighted some of the advantages the UK has. Alongside vast clinical trials, the country has been home to most of the world’s genetic sequencing, the development of…
Diversity in clinical trials Recently, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research’s (CDER’s) released its 2020 Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report. Part of the report examines the demographics of participants in clinical trials for the 53 drugs that FDA approved in 2020 either as new molecular entities (NMEs) under new drug applications (NDAs) or…
A few facts: Pharma is increasingly a key driver of US R&D. Pharmaceutical firms share of R&D increased from <10% in the early 1970s to 24% in 2018 (among firms in Compustat data). Moreover, 5 out of top 10 largest R&D spenders in Compustat in 2010 were pharmaceutical firms. A majority of drugs are targeted…
How do you evaluate treatment efficacy and safety outside of the clinical trial setting? This is not just a question of academic interest. In last week’s JAMA, Rubin 2021 writes about some of the challenges of evaluating COVID-19 vaccines outside of a clinical trial setting. In an interesting, two-day workshop last week, the Duke Margolis…
Should the US have a formal, centralized health technology assessment (HTA) organization? In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) plays this roles and has a significant impact on drug pricing in the UK. However, the UK relies on a single payer system and NICE’s recommendations can be directly implemented…
Medicare Part D covers prescription drugs for largely elderly Americans in the U.S. Those who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid receive Part D drug coverage with no premiums and reduced copayments through the low-income subsidy program (LIS). Although federal and state government pays for about 6 out of every 7 dollars of the Part…
How can we best accelerate vaccine availability? This is the question that Ahuja et al. (2021) try to answer in their Becker-Friedman Institute (BFI) working paper. First, they state the obvious: the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is large. Specifically: Each month, the COVID pandemic kills 300,000 people (as of Jan. 2021) and reduces global…
That is the title of an article by Angela Maas in Radar on Specialty pharmacy (reprinted here). A few excerpts: “Although state governments frequently pay for health care through programs such as Medicaid, in the past, state governments have not manufactured drugs,” says Jason Shafrin, vice president of health economics at PRECISIONheor. “Thus, this is a…
How do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies and researchers to develop new drugs for rare diseases? Drug development is expensive and–by definition–rare diseases have a small market. One solution to this problem is that governments have used orphan drug policies to provide monetary incentives for innovators to research drugs for rare diseases. But which countries have…
This is the question that a recent paper by Chorniy et al. (2020) attempt to answer. This issue is clearly very relevant as the UK recently has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 before the US. Unlike most studies that attempt to examine the relationship between FDA review time and R&D investment dollars, the authors…