Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What insurance is better: private commercial health insurance or public health insurance? This is a more difficult question than it seems since individuals with commercial vs. public health insurance differ over a number of dimensions which affect health care spending, quality and outcomes. To try and get at this question, a paper by Allen et…
We know that COVID-19 has increased both mortality and morbidity around the world. But is there a systematic way of estimating the impact of COVID-19 on both mortality and morbidity. A paper by Briggs et al. (2021) proposes one simple solution. They start by creating standard life tables. Life tables are created by estimating the…
In short, because we had built years and years of previous science, particularly work related to another corona virus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. As This American Life reports on the speed of vaccine development: That’s because the spike on this coronavirus that would cause the pandemic, it was very, very similar to…
This is the question that a recent paper by Chorniy et al. (2020) attempt to answer. This issue is clearly very relevant as the UK recently has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 before the US. Unlike most studies that attempt to examine the relationship between FDA review time and R&D investment dollars, the authors…
That is the basic question that Reed et al. (2020) attempt to answer in their recent paper. The approach they use is as follows: We designed a discrete-choice experiment to administer 10 choice questions to each respondent representing experimentally controlled pairs of scenarios defined by when nonessential businesses could reopen (May, July, or October 2020),…
Wouldn’t be great if we could find a treatment to improve longevity? Not just a treatment for a specific disease but one that could dramatically improve longevity for a large percentage of human kind. While there is a lot of longevity research going on and much progress has been made. There are some challenges. Milan…
As AJMC reports, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation that will allow California to produce and distribute its own line of biosimilars, biosimilar insulins, and generic drugs. My thoughts on SB-852 are covered in an interview in Radar on Specialty Pharmacy. Shafrin tells AIS Health that there are two key reasons for manufacturers to…
This is one of the main topics explored by the interesting book Remedy and Reaction by Paul Starr. The U.S. has gotten close to national health insurance programs a number of times. One of the first times was in New York after World War I. The one state where compulsory health insurance came close to…
Congratulations to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics. Below is an excerpt from the press release. Using auction theory, researchers try to understand the outcomes of different rules for bidding and final prices, the auction format. The analysis is difficult, because bidders behave strategically, based on the available information. They…
From the Nobel Prize website: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using these, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer…