Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Patients assigned to different primary care providers in the US have different levels of spending. This is not surprising, but to what degree is this result driven by variation in health care utilization compared to prices? A paper by Mehrotra et al. (2023) aims to answer this question using 2018 claims data from a large…
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…
Different health technology assessment bodies use different discount rates. ICER uses 3%. NICE uses 3.5%, but allows for a 1.5% discount rate as an alternative approach in certain circumstances. What does the US’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) use? A OMB press release from last week recommends that government agencies use: …2.0% for effects…
If you guessed manufacturers, you would be incorrect. At least that is according to a new study by Mattingly et al. (2023) in JAMA Health Forum. Using a sample of the 45 generic drugs with >$100m in Part D and used by >1m beneficiaries, the authors found that: …Medicare Part D spent $11.8 billion for…
That is the topic of an interesting paper by Ho (2023). Prescription drug use has reached historic highs in the United States—a trend linked to increases in medicalization, institutional factors relating to the health care and pharmaceutical industries, and population aging and growing burdens of chronic disease. Despite the high and rising prevalence of use,…
Via the Kaiser Family Foundation: In 2023, more than half (51%) of eligible Medicare beneficiaries – 30.8 million people out of 60.0 million Medicare beneficiaries with both Medicare Parts A and B – are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. Medicare Advantage enrollment as a share of the eligible Medicare population has jumped from 19% in…
The answer is health plans according to a new paper by Sen, Chang and Hargraves (2023): Using the Health Care Cost Institute’s data set of claims for one-third of the US population with employer-sponsored insurance, we found that unadjusted prices were higher in self-insured plans for most of the services we studied, with the largest…
All of us want new, improved medicines. Drugs that provide incremental benefits (often called “me too” drugs) are good, but truly revolutionary therapies are even better. However, how does one separate how “novel” a treatment is? Is there a way to quantify this? In fact there is. One way to do this is based on…
One concern when using quality adjusted life years (QALY) to measure health gains for cost effectiveness research is that QALYs “undervalue” health gains from life extension for people with serious illness or chronic disability. To see this clearly, take a look at the QALY formula (first formula below) and how it can be decomposed into…
National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) examines trends in opioid overdoses in their recent infographic. Unsurprisingly, opioid deaths have risen dramatically in recent years, but may have plateaued in the last 12 months. Opioid deaths are more common among prime working age individuals (age 25-54). NIHCM used data from the Wide-ranging Online Data for…