Copay Assistance – Good For Patients, Bad For Prices
Peter Bach and I have an essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine laying out some of the problems with pharmaceutical funded copay assistance programs. Check it out.
Peter Bach and I have an essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine laying out some of the problems with pharmaceutical funded copay assistance programs. Check it out.
Shutterstock It has become trendy in health policy circles to believe that behavioral economic interventions are the key to health system improvement. After all, traditional economic interventions like pay per performance have generated underwhelming results, with little or no change in physician behavior. Why not try a non-financial, psychological intervention—like performance feedback! Well, a study…
Shutterstock American physicians dole out lots of unnecessary medical care to their patients. They prescribe things like antibiotics for people with viral infections, order expensive CT scans for patients with transitory back pain, and obtain screening EKGs for people with no signs or symptoms of heart disease. Some critics even accuse physicians of ordering such…
Let’s face it – us men are disgusting. So public policy experts are left to figure out how to keep us from behaving in our normally disgusting manner. Here’s one approach (thanks to Geoff Riley for bringing it to my attention): Think it will work?
For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been highly profitable. The recipe for such profits has been pretty simple for most of the last half-century–discover a chemical or molecule that treats a common problem, like hypertension or diabetes or erectile dysfunction, and make billions of dollars while that product is still under patent protection. But of…
One reason our healthcare system in the United States is so messed up is that so few Americans understand much about it. For that reason, their attitudes towards various healthcare reform proposals veer left and right depending on how they are asked for their opinions. Here’s great evidence of that phenomenon, as reported by the…
The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants…