Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to a 2022 CBO report, healthcare spending per person is much higher for commercially insured individuals than those insured by Medicare and this difference is largely drive by price differentials. Why are the outstanding research questions related to the prices commercial insurers pay providers? That is the topic of a recent Health Affairs article…
Every year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) makes projections of what the federal budget will look like, in particular, what the government debt and annual deficits will be. Note that these should not be seen as forecasts since CBO projections aim to measure what will happen over the next 10 years assuming no change to…
Paid family leave (PFL) provide paid time off for workers who care for a newborn (parental leave) or care for a sick or temporarily disabled family member (caregiving leave). The US is one of the few countries that does not offer PFL, but a number of State have decided to adopt their own policy. California…
That is the takeaway according to a November-December 2022 survey by PhRMA of 25 large pharmaceutical manufacturers. Among respondents, it was clear the IRA price setting provisions are already impacting, and are expected to have a growing impact on, R&D plans moving forward:• 78% expect to cancel early-state pipeline projects.• 63% said they expect to…
Part of the Affordable Care Act mandated a medical loss ratio (MLR) for health plans in the individual and small group markets. What this means is that if the MLR is 80% and insurers charge $100 in premiums, plan enrollees must receive $80 in services on average. If they do not (say they only receive…
A paper by Birg (2022) aims to examine how mandatory increases in rebates for pharmaceutical products impacts the use of parallel imports. She uses a policy change from 2010 in Germany which mandated increased pharmaceutical rebates to identify the impact of this change. What are parallel imports? Parallel imports are drugs that are imported from…
Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem. My own research shows that when infections are antibiotic resistance, the risk of complications rises as does the cost to treat the infection. According to the CDC, antimicrobial resistance is a major public health problem: …killing at least 1.27 million people worldwide and associated with nearly 5 million deaths…
That is the title of a article yesterday in Kaiser Health News. What is your initial reaction to this title? That pharmaceutical firms are making unfair profits here? Likely so. However, if you keep reading, you will see the following: In the United Kingdom, where health care is generally free and Takeda sells the drug…
That is the subtitle from an article in F1000 from Rena Conti (2020). Some individuals claim that because the federal government–often through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)–fund basic research that can inform drug development and then consumers have to pay for those drugs once again after they are approved, this means that Americans are…
It is well known that excessive use of alcohol causes significant health impacts. CDC notes that Excessive alcohol use led to more than 140,000 deaths and 3.6 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2015 – 2019, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of…