Reasons to Regulate Provider Pricing
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The March of Dimes is teaming up with the leading maternity experts to lobby for KV Pharmaceuticals to reconsider its decision to boost the price of a drug that prevents premature birth from $10 a shot to $1,500 a shot. The drug company gained exclusive rights to produce a progesterone shot used to prevent premature births in high-risk mothers from the Food and Drug Administration in February, and soon after announced that they would list the drug at a price 150 times higher than the cost of the non-branded version women have been using for years.
Price of Preventing Premature Births Skyrockets With New Drug - ABC News
From CommonHealth :
Massachusetts stakeholders’ consensus on principles of payment reform | The Incidental Economist
According to this study , I would certainly say yes!
Healthcare Economist · Do the elderly need help managing their prescriptions?
Co-Pay Coupons for Patients, but Higher Bills for Insurers - NYTimes.com
The reason, it turned out, was that patients were using a card distributed by the maker of an expensive antibiotic used to treat , sharply reducing their insurance co-payments.Ezra Klein - What happens when Medicare controls costs too well
How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trahos?
…in a fierce turf battle rooted in the growing pressures on the medical profession and academia, New York State’s 16 medical schools are attacking their foreign competitors. They have begun an aggressive campaign to persuade the State Board of Regents to make it harder, if not impossible, for foreign schools to use New York hospitals as extensions of their own campuses. The changes, if approved, could put at least some of the Caribbean schools in jeopardy, their deans said, because their small islands lack the hospitals to provide the hands-on training that a doctor needs to be licensed in the United States.
Marginal Revolution: We need more supply-side health policy
Arizona’s Medicaid Cuts for Transplants Is Seen as Sign of Financial Times - NYTimes.com
What distinguishes the reductions recently imposed in Arizona, where coverage was eliminated on Oct. 1 for certain transplants of the heart, liver, lung, pancreas and bone marrow, is the decision to stop paying for treatments urgently needed to ward off death. The cuts in transplant coverage, which could deny organs to 100 adults currently on the transplant list, are testament to both the severity of fiscal pressures on the states and the particular bloodlessness of budget-cutting in Arizona. “It’s a real sign of the times,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy .
Want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Easton, Md.? If you're a senior covered by Medicare, the wait is eight weeks. How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trahos?
Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
The Perennial Quest to Lower Health Care Spending by Uwe E. Reinhardt - NYTimes.com
Health Care: The Disquieting Truth by Arnold Relman | The New York Review of Books
Most experts agree that the central problem with the US health care system is its high cost. We can’t afford universal coverage unless there is much better control of medical expenditures, which are now reaching over $2.5 trillion per year. What’s more, without effective control of health costs the federal budget deficit and the national debt will continue to increase.
The Department of Health and Human Services largely rubber-stamped the NAIC’s recommendations for medical loss ratios. Recall these are the rules behind calculating that health insurers spend 80 cents of the premium dollar on providing medical services (85 cents for group health plans).
The medical loss ratio game « Actuarial Opinions
Two Surveys Spotlight Health-Care Cost Variations - Health Blog - WSJ
The prices of health-care goods and services are tough to suss out .The figure below is from a National Institute for Health Care Management Expert Voices article by Eric Jensen and Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Company. If you can’t make out the fine print, click to see an enlarged version. It’s worth some careful scrutiny.
Why the US spends more on health care | The Incidental Economist
The Idaho Fee Schedule: An Opening Skirmish in the Cost Containment Wars - Workers Comp Insider
With a population around 1.5 million and a land mass the size of New England, Idaho is probably not the first state that comes to mind in the national struggle to contain medical costs.Reader Francois T highlighted a story at Washington Monthly that I recommend highly to readers. It illustrates how the intersection of corporate pursuit of profit and regulatory backfires can produce tidy oligopolies that pursue rent-seeking behavior with impunity.