Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Funding breakthrough therapies: a systematic review and recommendation. Health Policy Published 2nd December 2017
One of the (numerous) financial pressures on health care funders in the West is the introduction of innovative (and generally very expensive) new therapies. Some of these can be considered curative, which isn’t necessarily the best way for manufacturers to create a steady income. New funding arrangements have been proposed to facilitate patient access while maintaining financial sustainability. This article focuses on a specific group of innovative therapies known as ‘Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products’ (ATMPs), which includes gene therapies. The authors conducted a systematic review of papers proposing funding models and considered their appropriateness for ATMPs. There were 48 papers included in the review that proposed payment mechanisms for high-cost therapies. Three top-level groups were identified: i) financial agreements, ii) performance-based agreements, and iii) healthcoin (a tradable currency representing the value of outcomes). The different mechanisms are compared in terms of their feasibility, acceptability, burden, ‘financial attractiveness’ and their appeal to payers and manufacturers. Annuity payments are identified as relatively attractive compared to other options, but each mechanism is summarily shown to be imperfect in the ATMP context. So, instead, the authors propose an ATMP-specific fund. For UK readers, this will likely smell a bit too much like the disastrous Cancer Drugs Fund. It isn’t clear why such a programme would be superior to annuity payments or more inventive mechanisms, or even whether it would be theoretically sound. Thus, the proposal is not convincing.
Supply-side effects from public insurance expansions: evidence from physician labor markets. Health Economics [PubMed] Published 1st December 2017
Crazy though American health care may be, its inconsistency in coverage can make for good research fodder. The Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was set up in 1997 and then, when the initial money ran out 10 years later, the program was (eventually) expanded. In this study, the authors use the changes in CHIP to examine the impact of expanded public coverage on provider behaviour, namely; subspecialty training (which could become more attractive with a well-insured customer base), practice setting and prevailing wage offers. The data for the study relate to the physician labour market for New York state for 2002-2013, as collected in the Graduate Medical Education survey. A simple difference-in-differences analysis is conducted with reference to the 2009 CHIP expansion, controlling for physician demographics. Paediatricians are the treatment group and the control group is adult physician generalists (mostly internal medicine). 2009 seems to be associated with a step-change in the proportion of paediatricians choosing to subspecialise – an increased probability of about 8 percentage points. There is also an upward shift in the proportion of paediatricians entering private practice, with some (weak) evidence that there is an increased preference for rural areas. These changes don’t seem to be driven by relative wage increases, with no major change in trends. So it seems that the expanded coverage did have important supply-side effects. But the waters are muddy here. In particular, we have the Great Recession and Obamacare as possible alternative explanations. Though it’s difficult to come up with good reasons for why these might better explain the observed changes.
Reflections on the NICE decision to reject patient production losses. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care [PubMed] Published 20th November 2017
When people conduct economic evaluations ‘from a societal perspective’, this often just means a health service perspective with productivity losses added. NICE explicitly exclude the inclusion of these production losses in health technology appraisals. This paper reviews the issues at play, focussing on the normative question of why they should (or should not) be included. Findings from a literature review are summarised with reference to the ethical, theoretical and policy questions. Unethical discrimination potentially occurs if people are denied health care on the basis of non-health-related characteristics, such as the ability to work. All else equal, should health care for men be prioritised over health care for women because men have higher wages? Are the unemployed less of a priority because they’re unemployed? The only basis on which to defend the efficiency of an approach that includes productivity losses seems to be a neoclassical welfarist one, which is hardly tenable in the context of health care. If we adopt the extra-welfarist understanding of opportunity cost as foregone health then there is really no place for production losses. The authors also argue that including production losses may be at odds with policy objectives, at least in the context of the NHS in the UK. Health systems based on privately-funded care or social insurance may have different priorities. The article concludes that taking account of production losses is at odds with the goal of health maximisation and therefore the purpose of the NHS in the UK. Personally, I think priority setting in health care should take a narrow health perspective. So I agree with the authors that production losses shouldn’t be included. I’m not sure this article will convince those who disagree, but it’s good to have a reference to vindicate NICE’s position.
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