Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Louisiana has already begun adopting a “Netflix” pricing model to pay for Hepatitis C treatments. Rather than pay per treatment, Louisiana would pay a flat rate per month to access as many Hepatitis C treatments as they need. The benefit of this is (i) states have predictable budgets and (ii) manufacturers have predicable revenues. This…
A typical answer is that the cost of R&D is very high. However, an interesting book by–César Hidalgo titled Why Information Grows–offers a more conceptual rationale. Medicinal pills embody little information, as their active compound is usually a small and relative simple molecule. Yet medicinal pills can be extremely useful and valuable. Why? To understand…
In general, health economists would like to have health insurers cover treatments that are welfare improving in the Pareto sense. This means, if a treatment provides more expected benefits than costs and no one is worse off (in expectation), then this treatment should certainly be covered. It could be the case, however, that people care…
That is the title of my recent piece in STAT News. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced the creation of Project Facilitate. This pilot program facilitates access to innovative treatments for cancer that have not yet been approved by individuals who aren’t able to enroll in clinical trials. This move suggests that the…
According to a paper this month in Value in Health from Anupam Bapu Jena, Julia Thornton Snider, Oliver Diaz Espinosa, Andy Ingram, Yuri Sanchez Gonzalez and Darius Lakdawalla, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors look at how curing chronic hepatitis C affects the likelihood of getting a liver, lung, heart, or kidney transplant for individuals…
Why is the cost of cancer treatments growing so much in recent years? A new paper in the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) by my at Precision Health Economics colleague Jesse Sussell and co-authors (2019) has an explanation using data between 1997 and 2015 on cancer prices and the size of each treatment’s indicated…
Perhaps the answer is yes according to research from Frank Lichtenberg. Every year, according to Lichtenberg’s research, drugs launched since 1982 are adding 150 million life-years to the lifespans of people in 22 countries that he analyzed. He calculated the average pharmaceutical expenditure per life-year saved at $2,837 — a bargain, he says.“According to most…
To answer this question, one can examine how individuals choose health plans based on premiums, expected out of pocket cost, plan quality, and other factors. A paper by Abaluck and Gruber (2011) use data from 2006 and find that up to 70% of seniors appear to choose plans that are not optimal. Do these conclusions…
Today at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) 2019 Annual Conference, I attended a session titled “Medicare Formulary Updates Impact. How will proposed recent rulemaking affect formulary design? Some answers are below. CMS 2020 draft call letter Improved access to opioid reversal agents. The CMS 2020 draft call letter would place opioid reversal agents…
How did Medicaid expansion affect prescription drug use? At first glance, one would think that prescriptions increased; more insurance lowers patient out-of-pocket cost so we would expect more prescriptions. Medicaid insurance may crowd out other forms of insurance; if those other forms of insurance covered more drugs, then perhaps utilization would go down. A study…