Author: Richard Meyer

Pharma steps in it as blame game continues

  • Pharmacy benefit managers said rebates paid by drug companies to PBMs, sometimes called “middlemen,” are “not secret or hidden payments”
  • Executives blamed high drug prices on the drugmakers and their pursuit of profits.
  • U.S. Healthcare Spending Reaches $420M Per Hour, On Track to Hit $12 Trillion by 2040.
  • 62 health care CEOs made a combined $1.1 billion in 2018 when calculating the actual value of cashed-out stock.
  • In the meantime Republicans are warning drug companies not to cooperate with probes into drug pricing.
Continue reading →

Healthcare cost crisis ignores prevention as a ke​y driver

  • The United States currently spends more than $420 million per hour on healthcare, a number that is increasing by the minute and is expected to top $12 trillion in 2040, according to HealthCostCrisis.org
  • The U.S. currently spends about twice as much as what other high-income nations do on healthcare — more than $3.6 trillion in 2018, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
  • Despite the higher spending, the U.S. consistently ranks near the bottom on major health indices such as life expectancy and infant mortality.
  • Health spending per person is growing  2X faster than household income driving more than 57 million Americans to cut back household spending to pay for healthcare or medicine.
  • The focus on healthcare spending continues to be cost but very little is said about prevention.
Continue reading →

Pharma late again

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

  • The rate at which companies have been creating positions for a chief digital officer, or CDO, has slowed to a trickle
  • Just 54 companies, or 2.2%, had created a new CDO position in 2018.
  • It’s because, these days, that job is the responsibility of the entire organization.
  • Pharma companies continue to view digital as a “tactic” rather than integrate digital into the whole organization.
Continue reading →

There’s little evidence that mHealth apps are effective

  • Out of the hundreds of thousands of mHealth apps on the market, the effectiveness of only 22 has been evaluated in the last decade, per a study published in Nature.
  •  mHealth platforms could cause more harm than good to providers and payers that choose to use them to improve consumer health.
  •  JMIR published a meta-analysis revealing that while fitness apps modestly increased physical activity, the average step count between app users and nonusers was nonsignificant.
Continue reading →

US Healthcare is now a crisis

  • The high cost of healthcare in the United States is a significant source of apprehension and fear for millions of Americans, according to a new national survey by West Health and Gallup.
  • Relative to the quality of the care they receive, Americans overwhelmingly agree they pay too much, and receive too little, and few have confidence that elected officials can solve the problem.
  • When given the choice between a freeze in healthcare costs for the next five years or a 10% increase in household income, 61% of Americans report that their preference is a freeze in costs.
  • Cancer drugs in the U.S. routinely cost $10,000 a month.
  • More than half of Americans in one poll said that bringing down drug prices should be a top priority of the federal government.
Continue reading →

Bad online health information is costing us all

  • The Internet allows the spread of false and misleading health information.
  •  Researchers at the CDC, for example, estimated that handling 107 cases of measles that occurred in 2011 cost state and local health departments between $2.7 million and $5.3 million.
  • A generation ago, patients were largely dependent upon the physicians they consulted as to how best to deal with a disease like cancer. Today they are becoming more reliant on mHealth, the Internet and digital health.
Continue reading →

American’s blame everyone but themselves for high healthcare costs

  • Most Americans are focused on what they’re being charged for health care, not how much they or an aging population are consuming, according to a new POLITICO/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll.
  • Respondents blamed drug companies, insurers, providers and even the federal government for surging costs while dismissing overuse as a central issue.
  • 54 percent of respondents believe that high health costs are a serious problem. Asked about the reasons, nearly 80 percent said the prices charged by drugmakers were a major factor, while 75 percent held insurance companies responsible and 74 percent held hospitals responsible.
  • Our high cost of care and modest health outcomes will remain stubbornly fixed unless our behavior changes.
Continue reading →