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The Goodman Institute Health Blog

Thursday Links

Posted on April 20, 2023 by John C. Goodman

The FDA approves some drugs other nations don’t want.

Study: After St. George’s Hospital in The UK ended its mask mandate for staff and visitors for some, but not all, wards,  there was no difference in Covid infections between the two settings.

Meta analysis of 2,168 studies finds that wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic led to negative health consequences, including itching, headaches, and restriction of oxygen.

Aaron Carroll: Contra the Cochrane mask study.

A new wealth tax in Norway causes the rich to leave Norway.

US compensates people injured by the Covid vaccine for the first time.

Health care cost effectiveness: how much is a quality adjusted year of life worth?

A type of jellyfish has achieved immortality.

1 thought on “Thursday Links”

  1. Bob Hertz says:
    April 21, 2023 at 3:55 pm

    The financial worth of an extra life is interesting to me. This issue comes up a lot in the discussion of launch prices for new drugs…i.e., if the launch price is $250,000, maybe that is OK because an extra year of life is worth at least that much to the patient.

    In the most common method of calculation, the analyst studies how much extra salary does an employer have to spend — across the board –to get workers to apply for a risky job. A large employer might have to spend $10 million in salary to recruit workers for a job that has a one chance in a hundred of killing them. Of course the numbers are more complex but this seems to be the general approach.

    I am not completely comfortable with this method. I would like to consider a much cheaper method, which is basically to look at how much money the average patient is likely to earn next year. This would be the approximate value to others of an extra year of my life.

    Of course this would produce drastically lower valuations. Our valuation of new drugs would start looking like England, where the NHS will often spend no more than $30,000 for a new medication. I am not so sure this is wrong.

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For many years, our health care blog was the only free enterprise health policy blog on the internet. Then, when the NCPA closed its doors, the health blog stopped as well.

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