Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice overview of how Medicaid pays for prescription drugs. Below, I except from this helpful piece, but do check out the full article here. One point that many may not realize is that State Medicaid Agencies do not actually buy pharmaceuticals directly from manufacturers. Rather, they reimburse retail pharmacies that…
New drugs have the potential to not only extend patients’ lives but also change their quality of life. But are the drugs approved by the FDA reflective of the broader US population? If there were lots of drugs developed for men but not women,or whites but not blacks, health gains from new drugs would be…
While at the national level, there has been much press about President Trump’s aim of compelling pharmaceutical companies to disclose prices on TV ads (since blocked in the Judiciary), at the state level changes are also afoot. A number of states are making moves to compel pharmaceutical companies to disclose drug prices. Others are compelling…
Consider the case of two drugs, Drug A and Drug B. Both drugs treat patients with the same disease. Further, assume they are close substitutes. When Drug A loses it’s patent and generics can enter the market, one would expect Drug A’s market share (brand + generic) to rise. In fact, Drug A’s market share…
How do you measure the value of new drugs? An organization known as the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review relies almost exclusively on Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY)-based framework. While that is a good start, many new treatments may have impacts beyond directly on health including on educational outcomes, productivity, caregiver burden. Further, society is…
Louisiana has already begun adopting a “Netflix” pricing model to pay for Hepatitis C treatments. Rather than pay per treatment, Louisiana would pay a flat rate per month to access as many Hepatitis C treatments as they need. The benefit of this is (i) states have predictable budgets and (ii) manufacturers have predicable revenues. This…
What will Trump’s “favored nation” policy do to drug prices and innovation? How will 340B reforms affect the price hospitals charge for drugs? Myself and my colleague Jim Baumgardner weigh in with our thoughts in an article in FormularyWatch. “US drug prices will certainly fall. However, prices outside the US will rise,” Jason Shafrin, PhD,…
A typical answer is that the cost of R&D is very high. However, an interesting book by–César Hidalgo titled Why Information Grows–offers a more conceptual rationale. Medicinal pills embody little information, as their active compound is usually a small and relative simple molecule. Yet medicinal pills can be extremely useful and valuable. Why? To understand…
How did Medicaid expansion affect prescription drug use? At first glance, one would think that prescriptions increased; more insurance lowers patient out-of-pocket cost so we would expect more prescriptions. Medicaid insurance may crowd out other forms of insurance; if those other forms of insurance covered more drugs, then perhaps utilization would go down. A study…