Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
STAT News has an excellent article evaluating where we are on the federal initiative to fast track the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. To date, the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was four years. Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, has already spent about $10 billion to help vaccine makers develop their candidates…
Based on an a medRχiv working paper by Vu by et al. (2020), the answer from an analysis of other emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The authors analyze hypothetical investment returns of a portfolio of 141 pre-clinical emerging infectious disease (EID) vaccine development programs across different emerging infections without a vaccine. These…
Join me tomorrow, 9/26, 12:00 PM EDT, as PRECISIONheor’s Jason Shafrin and Meena Venkatachalam discuss their recent blog commentary in the health policy journal Health Affairs on how novel methods of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis can be used to expand traditional value frameworks improve health outcomes for underserved communities. Moderated by Precision’s Kelly Wilder, there will be a live Q&A following the webinar.…
According to my post yesterday, it may seem like the answer is ‘yes’. The US spends by far the most money per person and the largest share of its economy on health care. While cross-country comparisons often grab the headlines, a New England Journal of Medicine Perspective by Katharine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra argues that…
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
President Trump signed 4 executive orders on drug pricing on July 24, 2020. How are they likely to affect drugs prices? Passing along rebates to patients The one of the executive orders mandates that rebates go to reduce patient cost sharing: These middlemen — health plan sponsors and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — negotiate significant…
That is the key takeaway from a recent JAMA Viewpoint by Carlo, Barnett and Frank (2020). While there has been some progress, there are still tremendous gaps that need to be addressed. For patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other more serious mental health conditions, less than two-thirds received care for their illness, according to…
Kapoor et al. (2020) uses rainfall on last weekend before the stay-at-home order as an instrument for social distancing. variables. They find that social distancing works and has persistent effects, especially early on: We test whether earlier social distancing affects the progression of a local COVID-19 outbreak. We exploit county-level rainfall on the last weekend…
Today, the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds released their 2020 report on the financial status of both programs (report, summary). The numbers don’t look good. I say this noting also that the projections do not take into account any impacts on mortality, health care costs and taxes revenue from COVID-19. Thus,…
I have written about the 340b program a number of times on this blog in the past (e.g., “The 340B Program: An Overview“, “340B Facts and Figures“). A new commentary by Thomas and Schulman (2020) in Health Services Research provides some additional information. For instance, why was 340B originally enacted? Blame the Medicaid Drug Rebate…