Category: Health Economics & Costs
Pharmacies Put More OTC Drugs Behind the Counter to Avoid Retail Theft
Over the years I’ve written a lot about shopping for drugs, using price comparison and other techniques like pill splitting, asking for a generic or all the above. The best deal in health care (almost the only deal in health care) is over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. Almost all OTC drugs were once available only by prescription.
Coworking Clinics Tailored to Physicians are the Next Big Thing (I hope)
Coworking spaces go back decades even if the name was changed to give the idea an aura of originality. One thing that is new is the concept is now being tailored for physicians. This is where an old idea gets interesting. Increasingly, physicians are opting to work for hospitals, large practices they don’t have a stake in and other employers whose interests may not align with their patients’. The reason many physicians are becoming employees rather than self-employed is because the financial cost of setting up an office is prohibitive, not to mention the headache of managing a small clinic.
Prior Authorization Seems to Work for Drugs
We study the trade-off between bureaucratic costs and reductions in moral hazard induced by managed care tools in healthcare…. Prior authorization reduces a drug’s utilization by 26.8%. Half of marginal beneficiaries are diverted to another related drug, while the other half are diverted to no drug. These policies reduced drug spending by $96 per beneficiary-year (3.6% of drug spending), while generating approximately $10 in paperwork costs. Revealed preference approaches suggest that the net cost savings exceed beneficiaries’ willingness to pay for foregone drugs.