Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
The answer is provided in a recent white paper by Pearson, Schapiro and Pearson (2022). They use IQVIA data through 2020 across 389 drugs treating 1.8 million individuals. The study finds that while 5% of drugs with an orphan indication cost more than $500,000 per year, these drugs make up only 0.08% of all patients…
That is the question asked in a recent paper by Gollu et al. (2022). The study abstract is below: Although people who go through the prison and jail system in the United States have significant health care needs, many leave it with no health insurance and, as a result, they experience gaps in access to…
A paper by Haque et al. (2022) inJAMA Internal Medicine looks at the price paid for drugs with indicated uses in both medical (i.e., human) and veterinary (i.e., animal) practice. The authors examined 200 human medications with the most prescription fills as identified in the ClinCalc database, who also had the same active ingredient in…