Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Conventional wisdom holds that orphan drugs treat rare (by definition) and more severe diseases. Because they treat diseases with significant unmet needs, their health benefits per person are large. But are they really? Does conventional wisdom align with the evidence? To answer the question myself and colleagues at FTI Consulting, including co-author Marie Steele-Adjognon, conducted…
Data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) provides the answer. Data below are sorted by most to least number (N) private equity-owned hospitals. One can clearly see that Texas is leading the way in terms of raw numbers but New Mexico has the highest share of hospitals that are PE-owned. You can find more…
That is the title of a new paper published in the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) with co-authors Jacob Fajnor, Shurui Zhang, and Donald Nichols. The abstract is below. Objectives: To (1) develop a metric that quantitatively measures the risk that utilization management (UM) policies pose to patients and (2) measure the relationship between…
Likely ‘no‘. While CMS can consider drug prices as part of IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation, it is limited to considering only U.S. market data. Here is an excerpt from the IRA text: For purposes of negotiating the maximum fair price of a selected drug under this part with the manufacturer of the drug, the…
A press release from CMS today provides the answer: [The Department of Health and Human Services] HHS expects each manufacturer to commit to aligning US pricing for all brand products across all markets that do not currently have generic or biosimilar competition with the lowest price of a set of economic peer countries. The MFN…
From the Conversation with Tyler podcast with Sheilagh Ogilvie: [Ogilvie]: Historically, there was another reason, which was the medical guilds — the equivalent of the American Medical Association, only much, much worse, back in early modern Europe did not like the idea of this new thing, this new technology that they had not approved and that was…
Sanofi joins 340B lawsuit. Kaiser behavioral health workers on strike. Apologia of PBMs. Status of brain-computer interfaces. How old is the moon?
Many studies have found that patients with lower socioeconomic status (SES) have worse access to care. For instance, patients from lower SES have longer wait times (see review papers Landi et al. 2018 and Siciliani 2016). One key question is whether these disparities depend on how socioeconomic status is measured: at the individual level or…
The Pink Sheet reports on a new international health technology assessment (HTA) body: Health Economics Methods Advisory group (HEMA). The Health Economics Methods Advisory group (HEMA) is a new, independent group of health technology assessment agencies from the US, England and Canada that will work together to develop recommendations on adopting novel health economic methods…
From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution: One of the problems with an RFK Jr. ascendancy is that his core views, which run strongly against vaccines and pharmaceuticals, make it unlikely that any of these reimbursement revisions will be done in a rational or scientific way. The best evidence indicates that pharmaceuticals are a relatively cost-effective ways of saving…