Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Biosimilar drugs for biologic treatments are analogous to generic drugs for branded small molecules. Switching to biosimilars after biologic patent expiry can save payers and patients money. Why doesn’t it happen more often? There are a variety of reasons but a paper by Bond et al. (2023) argues that the 340B program incentivizes hospitals to…
That is the finding from a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the activities of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) CBO previously estimated that CMMI’s activities would reduce net federal spending but now estimates that they increased that spending during the first 10 years of the center’s operation and will…
How do pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) claim they can reduce cost? A Health Affairs Forefront article by Brennan and Shrank (2023) identify 6 key pathways: Mail order. Mail order alternative is often cheaper than dispensing at the retail pharmaciesdue to greater scale and automation Negotiating power. PBMs leverage purchasing power to lower dispensing fees. PBMs…
According to a paper by Smith et al. 2023, the answer is ‘no’. The authors use data from AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) State Inpatient Data, Hospital Cost Reporting Information System Data, Office of Pharmacy Affairs Information System Data, and American Hospital Association Annual Survey for 15 states between 2008 to 2014. The…
Perhaps according to a report from Stat News: A groundbreaking clause in a new deal between the Department of Health and Human Services and the pharmaceutical company Regeneron marks the first time the Biden administration has directly used its leverage to challenge drugmakers’ list prices, experts told STAT.The contract between Regeneron and the government requires…
An NBER paper by Dettling and Kearney (2023) finds that unemployment rate impacts both fertility rates and birth outcomes. Using data on birth outcomes from National Center for Health Statistics, data on local unemployment from BLS’s Local Area Unemployment Statistics, data on the share of families who are liquidity-constrained from the Survey of Consumer Finances.…
CMS released a guidance on June 30, 2023 providing additional detail on on how the maximum fair price (MFP) will be calculated. The document also has nearly 100 pages of public input comments. A summary of some key points are below. Of most interest is that CMS is taking a ‘reference price’ based approach to…
A paper by Fabre and Straub (2023) examines how public-private partnerships (PPP) have worked in practice. Why would linking public and private provisions of goods and services be useful? One reason is that the public sector might have policy goals (e.g., providing health care to the poor), which the private sector may not provide in…
That is the title of a new working paper written by myself, any my FTI Consulting colleagues Sabiha Quddus and Suhail Thahir. The abstract is below. Some policymakers have called for weakening of intellectual property protections for vaccines and other pharmaceutical products, with the aim to reduce the price and improve access to existing medical…