The Largest Insurance Expansion in History

That is the title of an important paper by Jonathan Gruber, Mengyun Lin & Junjian Yi. The abstract is below: The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS…

European Union Pharmaceutical Package: A Summary

Today I’m turning this post over to some of my FTI colleagues in Europe (Antoine Mialhe, Katja Murray and Valeria Fagone among others) who helped summarize the Reform of the EU pharmaceutical legislation that the European Union (EU) adopted on April 26, 2023. The summary below is provided by the FTI Consulting team in Brussels…

The hospital travels to you

In Bangladesh, seasonal floods occur due to snow melt from the Himalayas as well seasonal monsoons. How can villages in Bangladesh get health care if they don’t have a boat to transport them to regional health care centers? The answer–according to a recent article in The Economist–is that the hospital comes to them. Three hours’…

Quality Measurement of German Hospitals

Public reporting of hospital quality of care could improve the care patients receive through at least two pathways. First, patients (or their physicians) could send patients to higher quality hospitals (i.e., the selection pathway). Alternatively, hospitals themselves could have behavioral responses to the metrics and may improve quality of care in response to public reporting…

Challenge in HTA for gene therapies

Last month, the Office of Health Economics published a report titled “Health Technology Assessment of Gene Therapies: Are Our Methods Fit for Purpose?” I summarize some of the key challenges and solutions below. Challenge #1: Initial assessment of clinical effectiveness. Since gene therapies often target rare disease, the sample size from clinical trials is often…