Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It turns out that plenty of people hate Obamacare, but love the Affordable Care Act. However, they are the exact same thing. Obama’s branding the ACA as Obamacare may have hurt the appeal of the law. HT: Huffington Post.
Claire Wilkinson of Terms + Conditions hosts this week’s “easy come, easy go” edition of the Cavalcade. She’s got a great selection of posts and has done a great job of presenting them
Once a pharmaceutical is approved by country regulators, how does one justify to payers that the product is worth the price. An article at Real End Points identifies a number of key trial design aspects that are vital to proving to payers that the product is cost effective. First, having having a “meaningful comparator is…
Today, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller. Here is a summary of their contribution to the field which earned them the award. Eugene Fama. Beginning in the 1960s, Eugene Fama and several collaborators demonstrated that stock prices are extremely difficult to predict in…
Thomas Schael, ex-commissioner at the Public Health Authority of Naples, led the implementation of a system that produced annual drug expenditure savings of €20m. How did he do it? Eye for Pharma has a revealing two–part interview. The first thing Schael did to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals in Italy was to improve the efficiency…
Are PET scans for detecting Alzheimer’s more than just pretty pictures? Hospital or hotel? US women are dying younger than their mothers. Insurers getting faulty data from HIX. Quantitative Economics (a.k.a. Economists learn Python). Malaria vaccine on the way?
The Nobel prize for medicine honored breakthroughs in understanding how key substances are moved around within a cell. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and signaling molecules called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. That process happens through…
Joe Paduda has posted a great new HWR edition: Health Wonks on the Shutdown, Obamacare, and other matters of great import at Managed Care Matters.
One lesser known provision of the Affordable Care Act is that it regulates insurers medical loss ratios (MLRs). What are MLRs? Does this matter? A research paper by Karaca-Mandic, Abraham and Simon (2013) examines the question. They explain the ACA’s MLR requirement as follows. One provision that has gained considerable attention is the establishment of…
An interesting essay by Robert F. Graboyes begins by asking the following: American health care has no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. No Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Burt Rutan or Henry Ford. No innovator whose genius and sweat deliver the twin lightning bolts of cost-reduction and quality improvement across the broad landscape of health care.…