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.
Legal origins and female HIV. American Economic Review [RePEc] Published 13th June 2018
I made this somewhat unusual choice because the author Siwan Anderson draws an important connection between the economic and legal status of women across sub-Saharan Africa and the incidence of HIV. As summarized in the American Economic Review feature Empowering women, improving health, “Over half of all people living with HIV are women. Of all HIV-positive women, 80 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Anderson hypothesizes that regional differences in female property rights (lower in common law eastern and southern Africa than in civil law central Africa) may explain significantly higher HIV incidence in eastern and southern African women, especially relative to eastern and southern African men. Health economists have long studied how economic status affects access to health care; Anderson presents an important and interesting complementary argument for how economic (and legal) status affects health. In particular, improved legal status and access to legal aid may be a key step in improving women’s health.
Addressing generic-drug market failures — the case for establishing a nonprofit manufacturer. The New England Journal of Medicine [PubMed] Published 17th May 2018
We have recently seen shortages in many generic drugs, including generic injectables used in emergency, trauma and other hospital medicine. In many cases, there is only a single supplier, who can dramatically increase prices. One might expect others to enter the market in this case. However, frequently significant fixed start-up costs pose a barrier to entry and the single supplier, who has already made and in many cases paid for the start-up investment, can drastically reduce prices to make it difficult for the competition to cover these costs. Thus there is little incentive to enter a potentially low-profit market. The authors propose establishing a nonprofit manufacturer, essentially a pharmaceutical counterpart to a variety of national and nonprofit health systems, as a novel and a potentially successful way to address this issue.
An incomplete prescription: President Trump’s plan to address high drug prices. JAMA [PubMed] Published 19th June 2018
The prices of many drugs are significantly higher in the United States than in much of the rest of the developed world. President Trump proposes some market actions such as granting Medicare negotiating power; but the authors find these insufficient, making two interesting additional proposals. First, since much pharmaceutical development derives from NIH funded research (including chimeric antigen receptor T-cell immunotherapies which may cost $400,000 US per dose), the authors argue that the NIH and academic institutions could require US prices based upon independent valuations or not to exceed those in other industrialized countries. The authors also suggest authorizing imports where there is adequate regulation as a further mechanism for controlling drug prices; in my opinion a natural free-trade position. The pricing of pharmaceuticals remains complex and perhaps new economic models are needed to address the risk and cost of pharmaceutical development. Kenneth Arrow’s critiques of the limitations of economics to address health issues might provide interesting insights.
Cost-related insulin underuse is common and associated with poor glycemic control. Diabetes Published July 2018
I would like to conclude by citing a recent abstract providing a human side to the growing cost of pharmaceuticals. Darby Herkert (a Yale undergraduate) reported that a quarter of almost 200 patient responses to a survey of patients at a New Haven, CT, USA diabetes center reported cost-related insulin underuse. Underuse was prevalent among patients with lower income levels, patients without full-time employment, and patients without employer-provided insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. Patients reporting underuse had three times the incidence of of HbA1c >9%. These results cite the human costs of high insulin prices in the US. A Medscape review cites the high cost of typically prescribed insulin analogs, and quotes the lead author calling these prices irrational and describing patients living near the Mexican border crossing the border to buy their insulin.
Credits
But did you buy the ‘discontinuity’ in the Legal Origins and Female HIV paper? I think the underlying theory is a stretch but the discontinuity plots really make me think that the identification strategy doesn’t work. The points on the plots could easily be from the same underlying function – without the lines drawn on and no x-axis labels, I couldn’t tell you where they’re saying there’s a discontinuity. And, there are no error bars, which I suspect would overlap a lot.