Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Unsurprisingly, high-deductible health plans lead to lower utilization of healthcare services. A study by Sandoval et al. (2021) use data from 2007-2019 from Switzerland to show that this is the case. Participants with high-deductible plans reported forgoing health care more frequently than those with low-deductible plans (331 [13.5%] vs 591 [8.7%]). In adjusted analysis, higher-deductible…
Cell and gene therapies have the potential to produce dramatic improvements in quality of life and survival for severe and often rare diseases. Currently, however, the cost of these treatments is high and access is sometimes limited. To identify some of these challenges in Europe EURODIS conducted an evaluation of country-specific challenges with respect to…
Leah Rand and Aaron Kesselheim have an interesting commentary in Value in Health reviewing some of the challenges of implementing international reference pricing (IRP) in the U.S. IRP would set drug prices in the U.S. as no higher than a basket of drug prices in other developed countries. This issue is of particular interest due…
That is the topic of a recent paper by Augustovski et al. (2021). The authors conduct a targeted literature review of previous diagnostics value frameworks in other countries. A full list of these articles is below. Then the researchers pool the criteria and created a proposed value framework. A panel of experts was then met…
As COVID-19 has made many of us acutely aware, providing high quality mental health care is vital. However, the mental health care market is a difficult one for insurers; there is evidence that uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater compared to physical health conditions (for instance, see Frank et al. 2000). Thus uncertainty and…
The Economist has an interesting article on how Japan has been able to largely contain COVID-19. Part of the success has been a strong public health initiatives around avoiding the san-mitsu, or the “3Cs”. The 3Cs to avoid are: Closed spaces, Crowded places, and Close-contact settings. The phrase was blasted across traditional and social media.…
We all know that health care spending per person in the US is highest among all countries. But are these results consistent across age groups? That is the question posed by Papanicolas et al. (2020). Using 2015 OECD data from the US and 7 other high-income countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland,…
A new study by Choi et al. (2020) compares the health of individuals aged 55-64 in the US compared to England. They use data from Health and Retirement Study (HRS)–in the US–and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) for 2008-2016. Health is measured across 16 outcomes: 5 self-assessed outcomes, 3 directly measured outcomes, and…
Recently I read an interesting book called Moneyland by Oliver Bullough. The book describes how with porous borders facilitated by the internet, the rich can evade taxes, hide assets, and basically pick and choose the international legal system most favorable to their interests. One interesting part of the book discusses health care in the Ukraine…
Of course, clinical trials demonstrate whether a drug is efficacious or not, but are new drugs effective in the real world on average? Have they improved health outcomes at the country level? And do they provide good value? A series of recent paper by Frank Lichtenberg (see Lichtenberg 2019, Lichtenberg 2020a, Lichtenberg 2020b) aims to…