BACKGROUND Aiming to align provider incentives toward improving quality and efficiency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering broader bundling of hospital and physician payments around episodes of inpatient surgery. Decisions about bundled payments would benefit from better information about how payments are currently distributed among providers of different perioperative...

Drug pricing in the U.S. is a persistently vexing policy problem. Budgeteers, consumers and payers are all stressed by the pressures of high drug prices. At the same time, the public demands new and better cures. The pharmaceutical industry insists that delivering new treatment and cures requires compensation for the high costs and risks entailed in development of new drug products. There is su...

Leaders in health care and health care policy believe the U.S. must rein in the growth of health spending, and most believe it is possible over the next 10 years to maintain the current proportion of gross domestic product devoted to health care, the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey finds. Nearly all respondents (96%) agreed that spending must slow, ...

In this paper, we ask whether courts should continue to rule settlements in the context of pharmaceutical claims per se legal, when these settlements comprise payments from originator to generic companies, potentially delaying generic entry compared to the underlying litigation. Within a theoretical framework we compare consumer welfare under the rule of per se legality with that under alternat...

Under the Physician Payment Sunshine Act (PPSA), payments to physicians from pharmaceutical, biologics, and medical device manufacturers will be disclosed on a national, publicly available website. To inform the development of the federal website, we evaluated 21 existing state and industry disclosure websites. The presentation formats and language used suggest that industry websites are aimed ...

Establishing the clinical and cost effectiveness of interventions in healthcare largely depends on good quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs). One element of quality in RCTs is the recruitment of sufficient participants to test a priori hypotheses with statistical confidence and to minimise bias. However, many RCTs fail to meet their recruitment targets. One strategy to increase recruitme...

Empirical studies on pharmaceutical pricing across countries have found evidence that prices vary according to per capita income. These studies are typically based on survey data from a subset of countries and cover only one year. In this paper, we study the international trade and price of insulin by using detailed trade data for 186 importing countries from 1995 to 2013. With almost 12,000 ob...

OBJECTIVE Up to 50% of pregnancies are unintended in the United States, and the healthcare costs associated with pregnancy are the most expensive among hospitalized conditions. The current study aims to assess Medicaid spending on various methods of contraception and on pregnancy care including unintended pregnancies. METHODS We analyzed Medicaid health claims data from 2004 to 2010. Women 14...

BACKGROUND Informal patient payments for healthcare are common in the Western Balkans, negatively affecting public health and healthcare. AIM To identify literature from the Western Balkans on what is known about informal patient payments and bought and brought goods, to examine their effects on healthcare and to determine what actions can be taken to tackle these payments. METHODS After co...