A bunch of media outlets are beginning to report on a new study of mine (conducted with a couple of great colleagues) in which we found that docs choose different treatments for themselves than they recommend to their patients. Kinda scary stuff. This Marketplace report is worth listening to. Check out the ‘News and Press’ page for links to some of the other reports.
Latuda is a drug to treat schizophrenia. It costs about $4,000 per month in the U.S. In Canada, the price is closer to $500.
Ibrance, a breast cancer drug, costs $10,000 more per month in the U.S. than in Canada.
Why these enormous price differences?
Medication prices in the US have gone from wild to insane; from expensive to outright unaffordable. But a tripling in prices could save us all a lot of money. Here’s how that would work. It’s a policy known as external reference pricing. The idea is simple. First, the US government would look at how much…
In a recent Health Affairs article, David Asch and I wrote about how hard it can be to stop screening aggressively for things like breast and prostate cancer even when the evidence suggests we are doing more harm than good. Well, journalist Steven Petrow has a nice piece in the Washington Post looking at the…
On May 8th, the makers of the oncotype DX Prostate Cancer Test presented results of a large study demonstrating that their test can help men decide whether their prostate cancer carries a low enough risk of progression to forgo surgical or radiation therapy, two treatments that typically eradicate prostate cancers but also cause most men to…
There is a good debate starting up on a website called Prepared Patient Forum, about how much information patients should get when facing important medical decisions. You might want to click on this link and join in.
Suppose you are at the car dealer and have narrowed your choice down to two automobiles. One is a little nicer looking, and the other has a more comfortable interior. One gets twenty miles per gallon and the other gets twenty five. You typically drive about twelve thousand miles in a year, which means (queue…