Links
Deficit nears $1 trillion. Pelosi’s reference pricing bill. Gates Foundation to develop gene therapies. Was the ACA anti-marriage? Physician payment and lab test ordering. Patent buy-outs.
Why are organ donation rates so high in Spain?
As you can guess from the title of this post, Spain leads the world in rates of organ donation. More recent figures back this up. Figures published for 2017 reveal that 2,183 people in Spain became organ donors last year after they died. That’s 46.9 per million people in the population (pmp) – a standard way…
Making Life-Saving Medical Treatments More Affordable
That is the title of an article by my colleagues Anupam B. Jena, Rebecca Kee, James R. Baumgardner and others in an article published this month in Harvard Business Review. While the FDA has created “Breakthrough” designations for drug approvals, getting innovative, but high-priced drugs to patients is often delayed by hurdles in coverage and…
Quotation of the Day: On Work and Mortality
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” Rabbi Tarphon
Physician Decision Fatigue
When should you schedule an appointment with your doctor or dentist? I had always thought that being one of the first appointments of the day was beneficial because the doctor’s aren’t yet tired from a long day of work. For instance, I try to schedule my dentist appointments early in the morning just for this…
Friday Links
Gene therapies on the rise. No rebate drug markets? California health hazards. Exercise and dementia. BC/BS: Single payer = salad bar? …and the NBA season has started!
Fear of Falling
As people age, falls become not only more common, but more problematic. Every year 300,000 elderly Americans are hospitalized for a hip fracture, and 95% of these fractures are due to falls. Falls are the leading cause of fatal and non-fatal injuries among the U.S. elderly. What are people doing about it? Kaiser Health News…
Current Value Assessment Landscape in the US
A recent report by the National Pharmaceutical Council provides an overview of seven different value frameworks. Specifically, the overview includes value frameworks developed by: American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC-AHA), American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Avalere/FasterCures Patient-Perspective Value Framework (PPFV) Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) Open-Source Value Project (OSVP) Institute…
Are drug price transparency laws informative?
In many cases, the answer is ‘no’. At least that is the findings from a paper by Ryan and Sood (2019). As reported in FiercePharma: Sood and Ryan reviewed 166 drug pricing laws passed between 2015 and 2018 and found that 35 bills in 22 states included transparency mandates. Only seven of the laws were…
How likely are U.S. health insurers to cover drugs for rare diseases?
This is the question a paper by Chambers et al. (2019) aims to answer. The authors analyzed coverage decision of 204 drugs (or 409 unique drug–indication pairs based on information from the Tufts Medical Center Specialty Drug Evidence and Coverage (SPEC) database. This database contains coverage information for 17 or the top 20 health plans…