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6 days ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Cancer My Papers Cost impact of BTKi selection in Medicare patients with CLL Aim: To estimate cost savings associated with covalent Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor (cBTKi) choice in patients with treatment-naive (TN) and relapsed/refractory (RR) chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) from a Medicare perspective.
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1 week ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
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1 week ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Economics - General An empirical test for the Fair Innings hypothesis Suppose you have a single pill at your disposal and that pill will extend any person’s life by 10 years. You have to choose to give it to one of the following tow individuals:a 20‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies;a 70‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies.
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1 week ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
AI Economics - General Technology What share of code is being written by AI? A paper by Daniotti et al. (2025) examines 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024). The authors trained neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in the GitHub code. As one can see below, nearly 1/3 of code in the US is being written by AI as of the end of 2024.
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1 week ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
P4P Quality Do pay-for-performance programs actually improve quality of care? This is one of the fundamental questions in health policy in recent years. Quality can be measured in two parts. First, does quality improved for targeted patients? Second, does quality improve for non-targeted patients. The first question is relatively clear.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Uncategorized Which states have the most private-equity owned hospitals? Data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) provides the answer. Data below are sorted by most to least number (N) private equity-owned hospitals. One can clearly see that Texas is leading the way in terms of raw numbers but New Mexico has the highest share of hospitals that are PE-owned.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Health Insurance Managed Care States starting to limit payer use of prior authorization? The trend is continuing this year. Just a few weeks ago, Politico wrote:Within the past few months, states including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, New Jersey, North Carolina and North Dakota have either proposed or enacted reforms aimed at simplifying and streamlining prior authorization.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Nonphysician Clinicians How should nurse practitioners and physician assistants bill for their services? That is the topic of a Health Affairs Forefront article by Neprash, Perkins and Mehrotra (2025). This is an important question as approximately one in four visits are now provided by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) across the Medicare program.
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3 weeks ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
My Papers Pharmaceuticals Public Policy Key readings to help you evaluate a major change to US drug pricing policy On May 12, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order calling for “most favored nation” (MFN) drug pricing in the US. Key questions you may have include: ▪ What is MFN pricing? ▪ Which countries will be included in the MFN basket? ▪ How much lower are drug prices ex-US vs US? ▪ How should I evaluate MFN?
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3 weeks ago | 
healthcare-economist.com | Jason Shafrin
Pharmaceuticals Public Policy Consequences of Tariffs on Pharmaceutical Products The Budget Lab at Yale University projected that a 25% ad valorem tariff would increase medication costs by an “average of around $600 per year per household in the United States.”3 Tariffs can also create supply chain disruptions, increase costs and limit patient access to essential medications, and negatively impact research and innovation.