Which Is More Efficient: Employer-Sponsored Insurance or Medicaid?
By SAURABH JHA, MD
An old disagreement between Uwe Reinhardt and Sally Pipes in Forbes is a teachable moment. There’s a dearth of confrontational debates in health policy and education is worse off for it.
Crux of the issue is the more efficient system: employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) or Medicaid. Sally Pipes, president of the market-leaning Pacific Research Institute, believes it is ESI. Employers spend 60% less than the government, per person: $3,430 versus $9,130, per person (according to the American Health Policy Institute). Seems like a no brainer.
Pipes credits “consumerist and market-friendly approaches t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 13, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: at RogueRad Tags: Economics OP-ED employer-sponsored insurance Medicaid Sally Pipes Uwe Reinhardt Source Type: blogs
Hepatitis C and women of childbearing age
Hiding in the shadow of the opioid epidemic is another troubling public health crisis, the precipitous increase in people whose liver is infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV).
It’s likely you have seen the drug company commercials advertising medications to treat hepatitis C. In these commercials, it appears that hepatitis C is only a problem among older Americans. Although baby boomers still represent the largest group infected with hepatitis C virus, these commercials only tell a part of the story.
The hepatitis C virus is transmitted by direct contact with the blood of someone who is infected with the virus. Most peop...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - July 3, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Andrea Chisholm, MD Tags: Health Source Type: blogs
Government Regulation, Lawyers and the Opioid Crisis
By DEVON HERRICK
A short letter to a medical journal nearly 40 years ago may have been the nudge that set the opioid crisis in motion. A letter to the New England Journal of Medicine asserted addiction to prescription opioids was rare, claiming only four addictions were documented out of thousands patients who were prescribed powerful opioid pain pills in a hospital setting. The article has been cited hundreds of times in the years since. Doctors and drug makers may have relied on the letter as evidence that it was safe to prescribed opioids to more patients with chronic pain in settings far removed from carefully supervi...
Source: The Health Care Blog - June 12, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Opiood Crisis Vio Source Type: blogs
Drug Prices And Medical Innovation: A Response To Yu, Helms, and Bach
In a recent Health Affairs Blog post, Nancy Yu, Zachary Helms, and Peter Bach note that prices for top-selling drugs are higher in the United States than in other countries. They conclude that “premium pricing [in the United States] exceeds what is needed to fund global R&D.” They further suggest that “lowering the magnitude of the US premium” would have saved $40 billion for US prescription drug purchasers in 2015.
Essentially, the authors imply that the US price premium could be significantly reduced without affecting research and development investments or having other adverse effects. This is a strikingly b...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - June 2, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Henry Grabowski and Richard Manning Tags: Costs and Spending Drugs and Medical Innovation Featured Big Pharma drug innovation drug pricing Research and Development Source Type: blogs
Safe injection sites and reducing the stigma of addiction
Imagine a chronic medical condition in which the treatment itself has serious side effects. Examples of this are plentiful in medicine. For example, in diabetes, giving too much insulin can cause hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), a dangerous and potentially life-threatening condition. That doesn’t happen very often, but imagine that it was a common complication of treating diabetes because doctors couldn’t really tell how powerful a given dose of insulin actually was. And suppose that doctors and patient safety experts advocated for places where patients with diabetes could be carefully monitored when taking their insuli...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - June 2, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Scott Weiner, MD Tags: Addiction Behavioral Health Brain and cognitive health Mental Health Pain Management Source Type: blogs
Drug Prices Are Growing at Slowest Rate in Years
You’d think, from listening to politicians and news anchors, that the cost of prescription drugs is the highest it has ever been, and continuing to rise out of control. However, in reality, growth in drug prices this year was half of last year and the average out-of-pocket cost to consumers has decreased. This information comes from a new report from The QuintilesIMS Institute.
According to the report, growth in spending on prescription medications in the United States fell in 2016, as competition increased among manufacturers, and payers focused on efforts to limit price increases. According to the report,
Drug spen...
Source: Policy and Medicine - May 24, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
No, I ’m not settling for family medicine
During a recent internal medicine rotation, a senior resident expressed disappointment that I’ve chosen a career in family medicine. He was concerned that my talents would be wasted, because — in his words — I wouldn’t get to care for the “more complex patients” he sees in internal medicine. Although I appreciated his confidence in my abilities, I felt my heart sink, as it does each time I am faced with misinformed perceptions about family medicine.
I thought back to my last family medicine rotation, and the following patients came to mind:
A young woman with a previous diagnosis of idi...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - May 16, 2017 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/lauren-abdul-majeed" rel="tag" > Lauren Abdul-Majeed < /a > Tags: Physician Primary care Source Type: blogs
The Little Louisiana Purchase
By ROBERT PEARL, MD
“Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered,” the saying goes. And so may it prove to be true for the pharmaceutical industry.
Three articles, all published recently, illustrate the greed and egregious pricing by certain drug companies that are gaining public recognition and scrutiny.
Marathon Pharmaceuticals LLC serves as a case in point. Over the last 15 years, its chairman and CEO Jeffrey Aronin generated a billion-dollar valuation for the company. As reported in a Wall Street Journal article, “Drug Price Revolt Prods a Pioneer to Cash Out,” he achieved this milestone not by inventing ne...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 12, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The Louisiana Purchase
By ROBERT PEARL, MD
“Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered,” the saying goes. And so may it prove to be true for the pharmaceutical industry.
Three articles, all published recently, illustrate the greed and egregious pricing by certain drug companies that are gaining public recognition and scrutiny.
Marathon Pharmaceuticals LLC serves as a case in point. Over the last 15 years, its chairman and CEO Jeffrey Aronin generated a billion-dollar valuation for the company. As reported in a Wall Street Journal article, “Drug Price Revolt Prods a Pioneer to Cash Out,” he achieved this milestone not by inventing ne...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 12, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
New Checks and Balances For Big Pharma
By ROBERT PEARL, MD
“Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered,” the saying goes. And so may it prove to be true for the pharmaceutical industry.
Three articles, all published recently, illustrate the greed and egregious pricing by certain drug companies that are gaining public recognition and scrutiny.
Marathon Pharmaceuticals LLC serves as a case in point. Over the last 15 years, its chairman and CEO Jeffrey Aronin generated a billion-dollar valuation for the company. As reported in a Wall Street Journal article, “Drug Price Revolt Prods a Pioneer to Cash Out,” he achieved this milestone not by inventing ne...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 12, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Did Big Pharma BUY Big Media?
Healthcare is at the top of the list of societal problems in the U.S.
Healthcare interactions are unsatisfying to most people, costs are out of control and cost every American nearly $10,000 per person per year while bleeding 17.5% of GDP, more than any other nation on earth for a system that ranks low or last in quality compared to other developed countries. For a problem as big as healthcare, big enough to cripple the entire economy in addition to bankrupting more and more Americans, you would think that media reporting would be filled with debate, criticisms, and in-depth coverage about the problems in healthcare.
But...
Source: Wheat Belly Blog - May 2, 2017 Category: Cardiology Authors: Dr. Davis Tags: Undoctored abc bias big pharma cbs cnn drug industry fox gluten grains health healthcare illness media nbc pharmaceutical tv wheat Source Type: blogs
New Analysis Shows Out-of-Pocket Spending Based on List Price
New analysis from Amundsen Consulting, a division of QuintilesIMS, shows that more than half of commercially insured patients’ out-of-pocket spending for brand medicines is based on full list prices. Even though rebates paid by biopharmaceutical companies can substantially reduce the prices insurers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) pay for brand medicines, insurers use list prices—rather than discounted prices—to determine how much to charge patients with deductibles and coinsurance. The newly released data show cost sharing for nearly one in five brand prescriptions filled in the commercial market is based...
Source: Policy and Medicine - May 2, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
A Nurse, A Wall, And A Bloody Forehead
As a nurse career coach, I hear a lot of stories, and some of those stories revolve around the way that nursing has sucked the life out of a nurse ' s ambition and self-confidence. And what I see is that nurses who feel demoralized and beaten down sometimes stay in jobs that are killing them because they just don ' t see another way. A Wall and a Nurse ' s Bloody ForeheadWhen a nurse is hitting a wall, she or he needs to move away from the wall and find a door or window to slip through. But what I see over and over again is nurses banging their heads against the same wall over and over until their proverbial foreheads...
Source: Digital Doorway - May 1, 2017 Category: Nursing Tags: burnout career career development career management careers healthcare careers nurse nurse burnout nurse career nurse careers nurses nursing Source Type: blogs
Value-Based Pricing For Pharmaceuticals In The Trump Administration
Everyone seems to agree: Drug prices are too damn high. Scandalous prices for new drugs and enormous price hikes on old drugs have focused public ire on the pharmaceutical industry. A bipartisan consensus has emerged that something must be done to tackle drug prices.
There’s less consensus, however, about what that something ought to be. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices is one popular possibility; outright price controls are also under discussion. But with Republicans in control of both Congress and the White House, neither appears to be on the policy agenda. But one market-friendly alternative, “value-based ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 27, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Rachel Sachs, Nicholas Bagley and Darius Lakdawalla Tags: Costs and Spending Drugs and Medical Innovation Medicaid and CHIP Medicare Payment Policy Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services drug pricing outcome-based pricing valued-based pricing Source Type: blogs
Health Policy ’s Gordian Knot: Rethinking Cost Control
Medical spending has resumed its long-term rise. After several years of deceptive stability in the last, deep recession’s wake, health spending rose by 3.7 percentage points more than general inflation in 2014, then by 5.8 percentage points more in 2015, to a 17.8 percent share of the US economy.
Not only does this spending rise threaten the United States’ fiscal stability and capacity to address other needs; it is undermining the promise of health care for all. To manage rising costs, insurers are hiking premiums, narrowing their networks, and raising deductibles and copayments, making purchase of coverage less appeal...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 26, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Gregg Bloche, Neel Sukhatme and John L. Marshall Tags: Costs and Spending Drugs and Medical Technology Health IT Insurance and Coverage Payment Policy intellectual property patents Research and Development value-based payment Source Type: blogs
