- Breakthrough medical technology is working: Cancer drugs that function like heat-seeking missiles deliver chemicals directly to tumors.
- After years of writing and talking about health care, Jeff Goldsmith finally experiences it: the good, bad, and ugly.
- A downside of the IRA Act’s cap on out-of-pocket patient costs: “We anticipate that the use of tools like prior authorization or step therapy will increase in frequency or intensity. For providers, this will potentially increase administrative burdens and may affect the timeliness of care delivery.”
- How could a new budget commission succeed, given the failure of Simpson-Bowles? On cutting waste in Defense, Alam Simpson told me we have 1,000 bases overseas.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Drug Donation Programs Slowly Spread Across the Country
When I was a kid we never threw out unused prescription medications. Antibiotics and pain relievers were especially always saved and used, sometimes not necessarily by the person to whom they were prescribed. Of course, drugs that had a very specific purpose like my mother’s thyroid medication were not shared for obvious reasons. If a prescription brand or strength was change the old pills would languish in the bathroom medicine cabinet. As unorthodox as this may sound, it’s catching on with states, sort of.
FTC Moves Against Private Equity-Owned Physician Practice Cartels
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beefing up its scrutiny of private equity investments in health care. This past September the FTC sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) and the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in Houston federal court. The investors are accused of buying up a significant portion of large anesthesia practices in major Texas cities, allowing them to aggressively boost prices. FTC chair, Lina Khan, claims private equity investors “bought up the largest anesthesiology practices, then jacked up prices and entered into price-setting and market-allocation schemes.” Research has found that physician prices rose due to private equity investments.
Thursday Links
- Alex Tabarrok reviews The Big Fail. Best sentence: “Anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert opinion prior to COVID.”
- Biden invokes the Defense Production Act to stem drug shortages. This is a Cold War-era law that lets the government require private companies to make materials deemed necessary for national defense.
- Jason Furman on the 2017 Trump tax reform bill: It showed “taxes actually do matter,” adding that it provided “the most convincing estimates of the response of investment to corporate tax changes that I have ever seen.”
- Imagine getting medical-test results within minutes or seconds, before you leave the doctor’s office. That’s more likely for your dog than it is for you. (WSJ)
- Why cold symptoms are worse at night. (NYT)