Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Hill (1996) offers a useful comment that model builders–particularly in the social sciences–should keep in mind. “A major defect of the classical view of hypothesis testing, […], is that it attempts to test only whether the model is true. This came out of the tradition in physics, where models such as Newtonian mechanics, the gas…
The Economist has an interesting article summarizing the growing strength of Chinese pharmaceutical R&D. An excerpt is below: In 2016 the country became the world’s second biggest drug market. In 2018 sales reached $137bn, doubling in just six years. They are projected to be worth half of America’s by 2030, up from a quarter now.…
Most people who spend time in health care are aware of the opioid crisis. But how bad is it really? The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation provides a number of interactive graphs to quantitatively describe how the opioid crisis has evolved between 2000 and 2017. For instance, the the graph below shows…
Free college tuition? Tennessee to turn Medicaid into a block grant? Was there a white collar job apocalypse? Does automatic re-enrollment matter for Obamacare plan uptake? How will national health reform affect workers comp?
FDA faces an near existential crisis: digital. New digital technologies have the capability to improve the way care is delivered to patients. The question is, how do we make sure it is safe? The FDA is certainly good at making sure drugs and devices are safe; in the case of digital however, it is less…
One trend in recent years is how many hospitals are being purchased by large regional or national hospital chains. An April 2019 slide deck from the NIHCM Foundation shows this trend graphically. A paper by Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg (2019) provide some aggregate data as well as a case study from the Boston area. Four decades…
A recent AARP study uses 2017 data from IBM Marketscan to answer this question. Their data focuses on commercial and Medicare databases. They find that generic prices in 2017 fell by 9.3%. On the other hand, the price of specialty drug prices rose by 7%. The average annual cost of specialty drugs in the US…
Third World > First World. Ebola and economics. £200m for UK BioBank. Reversing aging. Is PFI the future for MedicareForAll?
Bernie Sanders and others are advocating a Medicare for All system. At first glance this is a sensible approach. Why not allow the government to provide equitable health insurance coverage for all? Don’t we want to let all Americans have high quality care? Why not use the power of the federal government to help negotiate…
Much of my blog discusses the value of new, innovative treatments. In the current patent environment, drug patents expire and low cost generics enter the market. This results in huge surplus value accruing to consumers. However, those benefits only occur if the supply of effective, low-cost generic medication reach patients. Unfortunately, that is not always…