Author: Daniel Callahan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801883393
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world—from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries—they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide.
Medicine and the Market
Author: Daniel Callahan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801883393
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world—from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries—they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801883393
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world—from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries—they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide.
Markets and Medicine
Author: Susan Giaimo
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472023527
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Are advanced industrialized countries converging on a market response to reform their systems of social protection? By comparing the health care reform experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 1990s, Susan Giaimo explores how countries pursue diverse policy responses and how such variations reflect distinctive institutions, actors, and reform politics in each country. In Britain, the Thatcher government's plan to inject a market into the state-administered national health service resulted in a circumscribed experiment orchestrated from above. In Germany, the Kohl government sought to repair defects in the corporatist arrangement with doctors and insurers, thus limiting the market experiment and designing it to enhance the solidarity of the national health insurance system. In the United States, private market actors foiled Clinton's bid to expand the federal government's role in the private health care system through managed competition and national insurance. But market reform continued, albeit led by private employers and with government officials playing a reactive role. Actors and institutions surrounding the existing health care settlement in each country created particular reform politics that either militated against or fostered the deployment of competition. The finding that major transformations are occurring in private as well as public systems of social protection suggests that studies of social policy change expand their focus beyond statutory welfare state programs. The book will interest political scientists and policymakers concerned with welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies; social scientists interested in the changing balance among state, market, and societal interests in governance; and health policy researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals. Susan Giaimo is an independent scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned an MSc in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the Politics and Government of Western Europe as the branch of study. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, University of California at Berkeley, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Scholars Program in Comparative Public Policy and Comparative Institutions, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She taught in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. During that period she won the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Founder's Prize for "Adapting the Welfare State: The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States," a paper she coauthored with Philip Manow. She has also worked for health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and medical practices in the United States.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472023527
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Are advanced industrialized countries converging on a market response to reform their systems of social protection? By comparing the health care reform experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 1990s, Susan Giaimo explores how countries pursue diverse policy responses and how such variations reflect distinctive institutions, actors, and reform politics in each country. In Britain, the Thatcher government's plan to inject a market into the state-administered national health service resulted in a circumscribed experiment orchestrated from above. In Germany, the Kohl government sought to repair defects in the corporatist arrangement with doctors and insurers, thus limiting the market experiment and designing it to enhance the solidarity of the national health insurance system. In the United States, private market actors foiled Clinton's bid to expand the federal government's role in the private health care system through managed competition and national insurance. But market reform continued, albeit led by private employers and with government officials playing a reactive role. Actors and institutions surrounding the existing health care settlement in each country created particular reform politics that either militated against or fostered the deployment of competition. The finding that major transformations are occurring in private as well as public systems of social protection suggests that studies of social policy change expand their focus beyond statutory welfare state programs. The book will interest political scientists and policymakers concerned with welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies; social scientists interested in the changing balance among state, market, and societal interests in governance; and health policy researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals. Susan Giaimo is an independent scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned an MSc in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the Politics and Government of Western Europe as the branch of study. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, University of California at Berkeley, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Scholars Program in Comparative Public Policy and Comparative Institutions, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She taught in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. During that period she won the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Founder's Prize for "Adapting the Welfare State: The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States," a paper she coauthored with Philip Manow. She has also worked for health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and medical practices in the United States.
Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450- c.1850
Author: M. Jenner
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230591469
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230591469
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.
The Market in Mind
Author: Mark Dennis Robinson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262536870
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
A critical examination of translational medicine, when private risk is transferred to the public sector and university research teams become tech startups for global investors. A global shift has secretly transformed science and medicine. Starting in 2003, biomedical research in the West has been reshaped by the emergence of translational science and medicine—the idea that the aim of research is to translate findings as quickly as possible into medical products. In The Market in Mind, Mark Dennis Robinson charts this shift, arguing that the new research paradigm has turned university research teams into small biotechnology startups and their industry partners into early-stage investment firms. There is also a larger, surprising consequence from this shift: according to Robinson, translational science and medicine enable biopharmaceutical firms, as part of a broader financial strategy, to outsource the riskiest parts of research to nonprofit universities. Robinson examines the implications of this new configuration. What happens, for example, when universities absorb unknown levels of risk? Robinson argues that in the years since the global financial crisis translational science and medicine has brought about “the financialization of health.” Robinson explores such topics as shareholder anxiety and industry retreat from Alzheimer's and depression research; how laboratory research is understood as health innovation even when there is no product; the emergence of investor networking events as crucial for viewing science in a market context; and the place of patients in research decisions. Although translational medicine justifies itself by the goal of relieving patients' suffering, Robinson finds patients' voices largely marginalized in translational neuroscience.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262536870
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
A critical examination of translational medicine, when private risk is transferred to the public sector and university research teams become tech startups for global investors. A global shift has secretly transformed science and medicine. Starting in 2003, biomedical research in the West has been reshaped by the emergence of translational science and medicine—the idea that the aim of research is to translate findings as quickly as possible into medical products. In The Market in Mind, Mark Dennis Robinson charts this shift, arguing that the new research paradigm has turned university research teams into small biotechnology startups and their industry partners into early-stage investment firms. There is also a larger, surprising consequence from this shift: according to Robinson, translational science and medicine enable biopharmaceutical firms, as part of a broader financial strategy, to outsource the riskiest parts of research to nonprofit universities. Robinson examines the implications of this new configuration. What happens, for example, when universities absorb unknown levels of risk? Robinson argues that in the years since the global financial crisis translational science and medicine has brought about “the financialization of health.” Robinson explores such topics as shareholder anxiety and industry retreat from Alzheimer's and depression research; how laboratory research is understood as health innovation even when there is no product; the emergence of investor networking events as crucial for viewing science in a market context; and the place of patients in research decisions. Although translational medicine justifies itself by the goal of relieving patients' suffering, Robinson finds patients' voices largely marginalized in translational neuroscience.
An American Sickness
Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698407180
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698407180
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
MoneyBall Medicine
Author: Harry Glorikian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351984330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 591
Book Description
How can a smartwatch help patients with diabetes manage their disease? Why can’t patients find out prices for surgeries and other procedures before they happen? How can researchers speed up the decade-long process of drug development? How will "Precision Medicine" impact patient care outside of cancer? What can doctors, hospitals, and health systems do to ensure they are maximizing high-value care? How can healthcare entrepreneurs find success in this data-driven market? A revolution is transforming the $10 trillion healthcare landscape, promising greater transparency, improved efficiency, and new ways of delivering care. This new landscape presents tremendous opportunity for those who are ready to embrace the data-driven reality. Having the right data and knowing how to use it will be the key to success in the healthcare market in the future. We are already starting to see the impacts in drug development, precision medicine, and how patients with rare diseases are diagnosed and treated. Startups are launched every week to fill an unmet need and address the current problems in the healthcare system. Digital devices and artificial intelligence are helping doctors do their jobs faster and with more accuracy. MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market, which includes interviews with dozens of healthcare leaders, describes the business challenges and opportunities arising for those working in one of the most vibrant sectors of the world’s economy. Doctors, hospital administrators, health information technology directors, and entrepreneurs need to adapt to the changes effecting healthcare today in order to succeed in the new, cost-conscious and value-based environment of the future. The authors map out many of the changes taking place, describe how they are impacting everyone from patients to researchers to insurers, and outline some predictions for the healthcare industry in the years to come.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351984330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 591
Book Description
How can a smartwatch help patients with diabetes manage their disease? Why can’t patients find out prices for surgeries and other procedures before they happen? How can researchers speed up the decade-long process of drug development? How will "Precision Medicine" impact patient care outside of cancer? What can doctors, hospitals, and health systems do to ensure they are maximizing high-value care? How can healthcare entrepreneurs find success in this data-driven market? A revolution is transforming the $10 trillion healthcare landscape, promising greater transparency, improved efficiency, and new ways of delivering care. This new landscape presents tremendous opportunity for those who are ready to embrace the data-driven reality. Having the right data and knowing how to use it will be the key to success in the healthcare market in the future. We are already starting to see the impacts in drug development, precision medicine, and how patients with rare diseases are diagnosed and treated. Startups are launched every week to fill an unmet need and address the current problems in the healthcare system. Digital devices and artificial intelligence are helping doctors do their jobs faster and with more accuracy. MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market, which includes interviews with dozens of healthcare leaders, describes the business challenges and opportunities arising for those working in one of the most vibrant sectors of the world’s economy. Doctors, hospital administrators, health information technology directors, and entrepreneurs need to adapt to the changes effecting healthcare today in order to succeed in the new, cost-conscious and value-based environment of the future. The authors map out many of the changes taking place, describe how they are impacting everyone from patients to researchers to insurers, and outline some predictions for the healthcare industry in the years to come.
Pharmaceutical Market Access in Developed Markets
Author: Güvenç Koçkaya
Publisher: SEEd
ISBN: 8897419747
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
Market access is the process by which a pharmaceutical company gets its product available on the market after having obtained a marketing authorization from a regulatory agency and by which the product becomes available for all patients for whom it is indicated as per its marketing authorization. It covers a group of activities intended to provide access to the appropriate medicine for the appropriate group of patients at the appropriate price (in most countries). Market Access may also be seen as activities that support the management of potential barriers, such as non-optimal price and reimbursement levels, the restriction of the scope of prescribing for the drug or complicated prescription writing or funding procedures. Since there are cultural differences among countries, any Market Access strategy needs to be culturally sensitive. Pharmaceutical Market Access in emerging markets has been extensively discussed in our previous book, published in 2016. The present book focuses on developed markets with the goal of helping students, academics, industry personnel, government workers, and decision makers understand the environment in developed markets.
Publisher: SEEd
ISBN: 8897419747
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
Market access is the process by which a pharmaceutical company gets its product available on the market after having obtained a marketing authorization from a regulatory agency and by which the product becomes available for all patients for whom it is indicated as per its marketing authorization. It covers a group of activities intended to provide access to the appropriate medicine for the appropriate group of patients at the appropriate price (in most countries). Market Access may also be seen as activities that support the management of potential barriers, such as non-optimal price and reimbursement levels, the restriction of the scope of prescribing for the drug or complicated prescription writing or funding procedures. Since there are cultural differences among countries, any Market Access strategy needs to be culturally sensitive. Pharmaceutical Market Access in emerging markets has been extensively discussed in our previous book, published in 2016. The present book focuses on developed markets with the goal of helping students, academics, industry personnel, government workers, and decision makers understand the environment in developed markets.
Medicine and Markets in the Graeco-Roman World and Beyond
Author: Rebecca Flemming
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 191058990X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
For almost half a century, Vivian Nutton has been a leading figure in the study of ancient (and less ancient) medicine. The field itself has been revolutionised over that time. In this volume distinguished colleagues and former students develop, in his honour, key themes of his ground-breaking scholarship. Spanning from the Bronze Age to the Digital Age, involving the cult of Artemis and the corpuscular theories of Asclepiades of Bithynia, the medicinal uses of beavers and the cost of health-care and wet-nursing, case-histories, remedy exchange and the medical repercussions of political assassination, this book has at its centre the pluralism and diversity of the ancient medical marketplace. The lively interplay between choice and competition, unity and division, communication and debate, so notable in Vivian Nutton's foundational vision of the world of classical medicine, is richly examined across these pages.
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 191058990X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
For almost half a century, Vivian Nutton has been a leading figure in the study of ancient (and less ancient) medicine. The field itself has been revolutionised over that time. In this volume distinguished colleagues and former students develop, in his honour, key themes of his ground-breaking scholarship. Spanning from the Bronze Age to the Digital Age, involving the cult of Artemis and the corpuscular theories of Asclepiades of Bithynia, the medicinal uses of beavers and the cost of health-care and wet-nursing, case-histories, remedy exchange and the medical repercussions of political assassination, this book has at its centre the pluralism and diversity of the ancient medical marketplace. The lively interplay between choice and competition, unity and division, communication and debate, so notable in Vivian Nutton's foundational vision of the world of classical medicine, is richly examined across these pages.
Merchants of Medicines
Author: Zachary Dorner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670680X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670680X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.
Making Medicines Affordable
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309468086
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309468086
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.