Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Conventional wisdom would hold that the prices are rising…aren’t they? To correctly answer this question, one must define which prices you are talking about. Are we looking at the list price that is widely available or the net price after we take into account discounts are rebates life sciences firms pay? A paper by Sarpatwari…
A new drug comes on the market. Is the health benefit worth the cost? What is it’s value? Value assessment frameworks are one way to answer this question. Value frameworks take the evidence of the treatments benefits, risk and cost and output some notion of the treatment’s value. Ideally, if anyone applied a given value…
A number of different federal agencies buy prescription drugs. However, the price at which these pharmaceuticals are purchased varies dramatically. To quantify this variation, a 2021 report from the Congressional Budget Office examines the following prices: Medicare Part D: the prescription drug program for Medicare beneficiaries. Prices are set when private insurers (or pharmacy benefit…
That is the title of an article by Angela Maas in Radar on Specialty pharmacy (reprinted here). A few excerpts: “Although state governments frequently pay for health care through programs such as Medicaid, in the past, state governments have not manufactured drugs,” says Jason Shafrin, vice president of health economics at PRECISIONheor. “Thus, this is a…
I’ve mentioned this in a number of previous posts, but large scale importation from Canada won’t work to bring down US drugs prices. The US market is too large and Canada does not have the supply to meet US demand. Further, policies proposing drug importation from Canada assume that Canadians will be passive actors in…
Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration published a final rule providing guidance for allowing drug importation from Canada. The drugs have to be approved by the Government of Canada’s Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch (HPFB) and can be imported by States or Indian Tribes, or in certain circumstances by pharmacists or…
A recent paper in BMJ Open by Moore et al. (2020) aims to estimate the cost of pivotal trials for recently approved drugs. The authors use the IQVIA CostPro Mid-Level Tool to estimate the cost of these trials. Note that a pivotal trials is one that provides ‘substantial evidence’ of benefit to justify marketing approval,…
I have written about the 340b program a number of times on this blog in the past (e.g., “The 340B Program: An Overview“, “340B Facts and Figures“). A new commentary by Thomas and Schulman (2020) in Health Services Research provides some additional information. For instance, why was 340B originally enacted? Blame the Medicaid Drug Rebate…
As for other “moneyed interests,” no fewer than 30 Big Pharma and small biotech firms are racing for treatments and vaccines. Moderna turned around a vaccine batch in just 42 days. Gilead Sciences is already in Phase 3 trials for its remdesivir treatment for Covid-19. Straight off President Trump’s announcement of FDA approval for antimalarial…
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…