Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The winners are James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for research to treat cancer using the body’s own immune system. The Nobel Prize officially was “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” The Wall Street Journal reports: The work of Drs. Allison and Honjo formed the backbone of new generations…
Pharmaceuticals on the one hand can greatly improve patients health and quality of life. At the same time, some of these treatments are expensive and–despite clinical trial results–evidence from the real-world is lacking at the time of a drug launch. To address these issues, Oklahoma’s Medicaid program is taking the lead by adopting two different…
Do “nudges” succeed or fail in the ACA marketplaces? NYT on bundled payments. Genetic instrumental variables. Cause of famine in China. Competition may improve efficiency, but how does it affect mental health?
Andrew Sprung has posted Map of Malfunction: Health Wonk Review at the xpostfactoid blog. Topics include the ACA, Republicans’ plans for Medicare, balance billing, pharmaceutical reference pricing, and protections for pre-existing conditions. Go check it out!
We will pause our regularly scheduled health economics posting to celebrate my home team, the Milwaukee Brewers, making it to the playoffs. Enjoy some non-health economics related videos. Regularly scheduled health economics posting will return tomorrow. This is only the beginning. #OurCrewOurOctober pic.twitter.com/8krT1RCOKS — Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) September 27, 2018 The best clip you'll watch…
An interesting article from Longreads on dealing with a grandmother’s terminal illness in China. Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to…
In general, one expects progress. One expects that medical advances will improve life expectancy. In recent years in the U.S., however, that is no longer the case. The CDC reports that: …life expectancy at birth decreased in recent years for the first time since 1993. Between 2014 and 2015, life expectancy at birth decreased 0.2…
A number of people talk about Medicaid “best price”…but what is it really? StatNews provides a concise overview: The Medicaid best price law, enacted in 1990, requires drug manufacturers to charge the Medicaid program the lowest or “best” price they negotiate with any other buyer and send a rebate check to every state Medicaid department so…
CEA and value-based care. Spending dynamics and health shocks. Are we ready for access restrictions based on CEA? Does Amazon lead to higher prices? The political power of pre-existing conditions.
The 340B program requires pharmaceutical firms to give large discounts to hospitals and clinics that serve high volumes of low-income patients. This sounds like a good idea at first: give money to people who can’t afford their medicines. However, when one reads the sentence above closely, it becomes clear that patients don’t receive these discounts:…