It is well accepted among health economics wonks that the lion’s share of pharmaceutical company profits come when these companies hold exclusive rights to their products. Once their blockbuster pills go “generic,” competitors enter the marketplace and profits plummet. Consider captopril, a groundbreaking heart failure medication introduced in the early 80s by Bristol-Myers Squibb under…
In the old days, blockbuster drugs were moderately expensive pills taken by hundreds of thousands of patients. Think blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes pills. But today, many blockbusters are designed to target much less common diseases, illnesses like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis or even specific subcategories of cancer. These medications have become blockbusters not…
The Managing Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine interviewed me about the piece I wrote, with David Comerford and Eric Johnson, on redesigning the health insurance exchanges. For those of you with long commutes, here is that podcast: Healthcare.gov 3.0
I joined two other, much smarter, colleagues in calling for the use of behavioral economics and decision psychology to improve the design of the websites people use to purchase health insurance in the U.S. That article came out today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is a taste: In October 2013, the Affordable…
In an earlier post, I wrote about the dietary supplements industry, which is largely unregulated by the FDA, to the detriment of the American consumer. Well here is a recent news story showing how a company is looking to take advantage of this lack of regulation: An anti-aging pill that is backed by five Nobel…
Bend a resilient object and it will spring back with a vengeance once released from your grip. Is that what is about to happen to healthcare spending? For years now, experts have been debating ways to “bend the cost curve ” – take the sharp rise in healthcare costs, picture a rapidly ascending line on…
A while ago, I wrote a post on how hard it can be for Medicaid recipients to get medical appointments, because so many physicians limit the number of Medicaid patients they see. They limit the number because Medicaid reimbursement is often, well, crappy! Here is a picture from a recent NEJM piece showing just how…
The ever reliable Sarah Kliff recently posted a nice graphic, showing a dramatic decline in the number of hospital visits for which hospitals received little to no money, because the patients have no insurance. But this decline occurred almost exclusively in states that expanded Medicaid: Political partisanship prevented many states from expanding Medicaid, despite the…
Paige Rentz, an excellent reporter at the Fayetteville Observer, recently posted a question and answer piece, exploring some of the pressing issues facing the second round of insurance enrollment, on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. I suggest you look at the entire article. But here is a snippet: What’s at stake? Last year, North Carolina…
Jonathan Gruber went from unknown to infamous in the last few weeks, a result of disparaging comments he made about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and even more disparaging ones he made about the American people. According to Gruber, the Obama administration counted on “the stupidity of the American voter” to pass the bill. In fact,…