Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of my new Health Affairs Forefront piece out today with Lou Garrison and Richard Xie. An excerpt from the article is below: United States policy makers increasingly argue that Americans pay too much for prescription drugs. In a recent report, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee minority staff contended…
That is the title of a Journal of Economic Perspectives article by Martin Gaynor and Amanda Starc (2026). The article provides an overview of the current levels of competition in US health insurance markets, considers theoretic issues in what levels of competition are optimal, what empirical studies have found of the impact of competition and…
That is the title of a recent white paper written by myself and Kristy Piccinini alongside a team from the Health and Fitness Association (Greta Wagner, Amy Bantham, Ken Griffin, Richard Beddie, Zach Weston, Cameron Saunders). Below is an excerpt: In recent years, glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists have emerged as a transformative treatment option, enabling…
GLP-1 and cancer. Healthcare mortgages for gene therapies. Argentia vs. Chile: battle of the economies. Medicaid work rules explained. Watch the World Cup in English or en Español?
When health economics emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 1960s, mainstream academic and policy paradigms widely presumed that competitive market mechanisms were structurally incompatible with medical delivery. Influenced by foundational ideas like Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 landmark paper emphasizing the pervasive friction of clinical uncertainty, early experts argued that society had to look almost…
From the very interesting book Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. To some people, a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine–a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s…
ICER found GLP-1 drugs to be cost effective for treating obesity. If that is the case, why don’t more US payers cover the GLP-1 drugs? Clearly, one reason is the cost given the sheer volume of patients i nthe US that are obese; specifically, >40% of US adults are obese. However, a bigger issue may…
FDA accepts 1st In Silico Drug Development Tool. Why GLP-1’s got more affordable. BALANCE after CMS GLP-1 decision. How to socialize scientific ideas in the age of AI. Mapping the Ebola outbreak. 1985-2023: MIT’s faculty grew 9%…Administrative staff grew 189%
Ingestible sensors are emerging as a promising frontier in gastroenterology, offering a minimally invasive way to monitor the gastrointestinal (GI) tract in real time. Instead of relying solely on endoscopy or colonoscopy—which are costly, invasive, and often avoided by patients—swallowable devices can capture biochemical signals such as gases and redox balance as they pass through…
How can we characterize the epidemiology and health care resource utilization of Americans with schizophrenia? This is the question a new paper in JMCP by Parks et al. (2026) aims to answer among patients enrolled in Medicaid. The authors use Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (MSIS) Analytic Files from 2016 to 2022 and find that:…