Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What are digital therapeutics? What evidence is needed to support their value? How should we pay for them? I participated in Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) Partnership Forum: Digital Therapeutics which took place in September 2019. The findings from that forum are presented in a recent JMCP article. An excerpt from the article is…
That is the projection from CMS’ Office of the Actuary. Keehan et al. (2020) write in Health Affairs: National health expenditures are projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4 percent for 2019–28 and to represent 19.7 percent of gross domestic product by the end of the period. Price growth for medical goods and services…
Let’s say you have a new health care treatment. How much is someone willing to pay for it? One way to find out is with a first price sealed-bid auction. In this type of auction, you ask people how much they pay and if they have the highest bid, they get the item. In this…
On March 9, I wrote a post titled “COVID-19 in context” which showed that COVID-19 was the 27th leading cause of death worldwide. Now that we are two weeks later, it is worth revisiting where we are. As you can see from the WHO situation report from March 22, the growth in the number of…
Failure of federal government vaccine manufacturing. Drug dispensing via vending machines? Trebek. Health economics use in designing adaptive clinical trials. Did ACA reduce crime? Is a sales tax better than a fat tax?
For those interested in a global view, the World Health Organization (WHO) Situation Reports are required daily reading. Key notes from the March 19, 2020 situation report: Seven new countries/territories/areas (African Region [3], Eastern Mediterranean Region [1], European Region [1], and Region of the Americas [2]) have reported cases of COVID-19. • The number of…
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
In theory, single payer systems are the best approach to deal with existential threats or pandemics. The strengths of single-payer, top-down approaches are that having most funds–and potentially most workers–within a single entity can lower coordination cost and lead to a more effective response. The key drawback of single payer, top-down systems is they typically…
A paper by Hernandez et al. (2020) in JAMA examines trends in branded drug prices using data from SSR Health between 2007 and 2018. The authors find the following: From 2007 to 2018, list prices increased by 159% (95% CI, 137%-181%), or 9.1% per year, while net prices increased by 60% (95% CI, 36%-84%), or…
Interesting video on exponential growth, logistic curves, contagious disease and COVID-19 from the always enlightening 3Blue1Brown.