Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
New pharmaceutical products aim to help individuals live longer, healthier lives. However, when new drugs come to market, they are typically indicated for a specific disease. In the real world, however, many individuals face multiple conditions. In fact, 57% of Americans have 2 or more medical conditions and 27% have 5 or more medical conditions.…
Health outcomes have improved in the US over the last 25 years. Clearly public health initiatives (e.g., reduced smoking rates) is having an impact, but another key key question is, what is medical technologies are driving these gains? Is it new surgical techniques, better diagnostics, improved medical devices, or new pharmaceuticals? This answer is difficult…
That is the finding from a recent paper by myself and co-authors Joanna MacEwan, Syvart Dennen, Rebecca Kee, Farzad Ali, and Katharine Batt. An excerpt from the paper is below: Between 2000 and 2016, deaths per 100,000 population across the 15 most common tumor types declined by 24%. Additionally, 10.2 new indications were approved per…
Although the high cost of pharmaceuticals is often in the news, these costs are offset by improved health benefits. However, it may not be clear the extent to which new pharmaceutical products lead to improved health at the national level. A paper by Lichtenberg (2018) aims to examine this question looking at the introduction of…
An interesting study from Garthwaite 2012 examines the removal of Cox-2 inhibitors. Rather than measuring the direct effect of Cox-2 inhibitors on quality of life or health status, Garthwaite examines how this removal affected labor market outcomes. Despite dramatic improvements in medical technology, little attention has been paid to the role of these innovations in…
Innovation in health care often improves quality but also increases cost. That is not always the case. Consider the case of an innovative Bangladeshi physician who was interested in improving care for patients with pneumonia who could not afford the $15,000 cost of the ventilators used in a developing work: However, after a second piece…
Below are some excerpts from seminal papers examining how changes in reimbursement or market size affect pharmaceutical innovation. Acemoglu and Lin (2004): Our estimates suggest that a 1 percent increase in the size of the potential market for a drug category leads to a 6 percent increase in the total number of new drugs entering the…
Today, there was an excellent briefing put on by Health Affairs at the National Press Club. The topic was “Understanding the Value of Innovations in Medicine” and the briefing contained two panel discussions (see agenda). The first panel , “Many Stakeholders, Many Values: Measuring Value In A Diverse Healthcare” featured expert economists, epidemiologists, and patient…
Health Affairs is holding an interesting event in September on “Understanding The Value Of Innovations In Medicine” at the National Press Club. They describe the event as follows: Value” is at the center of discussions of payment and policy, but value has different definitions and meanings reflecting the diversity of stakeholders in the healthcare system.…
The introduction of new treatment technologies typically occurs where there is a large market. A lot of innovations are developed to treat disease that affect a large number of people in the developed world because the financial returns are large. It is less likely to observe innovation in the treatment of rare diseases or diseases…