Long term care spending around the world

A great paper by Gruber et al. 2023 looks at the evolution of long-term care for ten countries: Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the United States. Long-term care is divided into three categories: institutional care, formal home care, and informal care. For the 10 countries examined, the paper finds…

Opioid prescriptions after surgery decline

That is the finding from a JAMA Network Open paper by Zhang et al. (2023). The authors use 2016-2022 data from the IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Database, which claims to capture 92% of retail pharmacy prescriptions. First, fewer opioids prescriptions were made (extensive margin): During January 2016 to December 2022, the monthly surgical opioid dispensing rate…

Strong year for drug discovery

2023 was a strong year for drug discovery. Mullard et al. (2024) report: The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 55 new drugs in 2023, as the small molecule and biologic pharmacopoeia continues to grow. This cohort is nearly 50% bigger than the new approval class of 2022, which fell below the…

US health care spending in 2022

It appears that health care spending as a share of GDP has leveled off. While reaching close to 20% of GDP during the pandemic, 2022 had health care spending (17.3% of GDP) more in line with pre-pandemic norms. Hartman et al. (2023) reports: Health care spending in the US grew 4.1 percent to reach $4.5 trillion in…

Drug approval times around the world

How long does it take different countries/regions to approve new medications? The US is the fastest and Europe is the slowest among selected major pharmaceutical markets according to a report by EFPIA. Moreover, while a majority (7 out of 10) of therapies in the US rely on expedited approval, in Europe less than 1 in…