Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In 2011, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded discoveries contributed $69 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and supported seven million jobs. In 2020 alone, the US biomedical and pharmaceutical private sector generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic output. From Reece et al. (Health Affairs 2025) In addition to economic output, private-sector R&D…
Chuanzi Yue and Marisa Miraldo argue in a recent Health Affairs Forefront piece that the answer is ‘yes’, but I am highly skeptical of their claim. Will IRA cause firms to allocate funds from marketing to R&D? One point they make is that the IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program will reduce pharmaceutical expenses on…
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes 17 years from medical innovation to adoption in the real-world. However, with advances in information technology, perhaps adoption timelines have shortened. A paper by DiCicca et al. (2024) examines how new clinical trial evidence on breech births impact practice patterns. Specifically, they note that: Using the United States Birth…
According to a paper by Miljković et al. (2023), the answer is ‘no‘. The authors examine oncology treatments with FDA approvals between 2015 and 2020 and identify average wholesale prices from Redbook. Drugs were classified into three categories: (i) first approval of a new mechanism of action compound, (ii) next-in-class approval regardless the tumor type,…
That is the title of a new working paper written by myself, any my FTI Consulting colleagues Sabiha Quddus and Suhail Thahir. The abstract is below. Some policymakers have called for weakening of intellectual property protections for vaccines and other pharmaceutical products, with the aim to reduce the price and improve access to existing medical…
A paper by Gracia, David and Conti (2022) in Health Affairs Forefront poses the question ‘how do financial incentives impact venture capitalist’s (VC) investment decisions in early-stage biotech companies, and ultimately innovation?’ To get the answer, the authors interviewed 5 venture capitalists to get their thoughts. Based on these interviews, the authors had 7 key…
Using data from 2006-2018 across 26 high-income countries, Lichtenberg et al. (2022) measures the relationship between pharmaceutical innovation and longevity. Innovation is measured by “mean vintage…of the drugs used to treat each disease in each country” where vintage is defined as the year of worldwide launch. For the U.S., the authors found that: …the diseases…
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…