Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the question considered by Wouters and Kuha (2024) in a recent Health Affairs article. The authors use IQVIA data between 1982 and 2024 on the timing of drug launches and estimate median delay times using a Kaplan Meier estimates. They find that: From the first launch globally, the median time to availability was…
From the FTC’s press release out today: Today, the Federal Trade Commission brought action against the three largest prescription drug benefit managers (PBMs)—Caremark Rx, Express Scripts (ESI), and OptumRx—and their affiliated group purchasing organizations (GPOs) for engaging in anticompetitive and unfair rebating practices that have artificially inflated the list price of insulin drugs, impaired patients’…
Why were drugs not included in Medicare in 1965? And the answer is, because drugs didn’t matter. They were not all that good, and they didn’t do a lot… We now see pharmaceutical care as the heart of treating someone; not so then. Steven Grossman, Executive Director – Alliance for a Stronger FDA It’s amazing…
That is the title of a fantastic editorial from Olivença et al. (2024). A lot of people when they look at pharmaceutical prices think they are ‘too high’ or ‘too low’. But the question is, too high or too low relative to what? What are our goals in pharmaceutical pricing. The editorial clearly articulates the…
Managing multiple medications is a challenge for many individuals, particularly the elderly. One study by Almodóvar et al. (2019) found that among Medicare beneficiaries eligible for medication therapy management (MTM), 51% had used 11 or more medications. One approach to improving medication management is to use an appointment-based model (ABM) and other forms of medication…
An interesting study from Miquel Serra-Burriel et al. (2024) examines the impact of genericization on drug prices across 8 high-income countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, UK, and US). The authors used 2011-2020 IQVIA MIDAS data across 505 novel originator drugs. They found that: Price decreases were statistically significant over the 8 years after…
Medicare drug price negotiation is here. The maximum fair prices (MFP) set by Medicare lead to discounts between 38% and 79%. In fact, the real discounts are larger since the figures listed in the table below are discounts off of 2023 prices (rather than 2024 prices). How did the negotiation process work? CMS’s fact sheet…
What everyone wants is getting new, innovative medicines to market quickly, but at the same time insuring we have enough data to confirm that these medicines are safe and effective. How do we balance these two aims? A paper by Ollendorf et al. (2024) provides some guidance. Some of their suggestions are summarized below. Make…
This is a common question I receive, often with the implicit assumption that prices in the US are too high. One key question to consider is, what are we trying to optimize? Tyler Cowen has a very good and brief post talking about drug prices and makes the case that (i) the supply of new…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report titled “Pharmacy Benefit Managers: The Powerful Middlemen Inflating Drug Costs and Squeezing Main Street Pharmacies.” While I won’t get into an analysis of the specific arguments FTC made, the report does have a number of interesting statistics and graphics on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Some…