Healthcare Policy

Patricia Danzon of the Wharton School commented on drug companies’ hesitance to produce new medications. “Bringing a new drug to market requires getting FDA approval and that requires doing clinical trials,” she said. “That’s a significant investment, and companies, unsurprisingly, are not willing to do that unless they can get a patent and be the sole supplier of that drug for at least some period of time.”

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel commented on a recent ruling that found the Affordable Care Act and its enrollment mandate to be unconstitutional. “People don’t like going without health care insurance. The big barrier isn’t compulsion; the big barrier is it’s very expensive and hard to afford,” said Emanuel.

Mark Pauly of the Wharton School was interviewed on “The Show” about the Affordable Care Act and cost containment. Most cost-containment efforts “don’t even work to slow spending growth at all,” he said.

A recent study authored by Linda Aiken of the School of Nursing and the School of Arts and Sciences was mentioned in a discussion of a failed Massachusetts measure that would have implemented mandatory patient-to-nurse ratios. “Better-staffed hospitals with good work environments actually returned lower mortality for the same or lower cost,” said Aiken.

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Aaron Glickman reacted to news that Medicaid may overturn a decades-old exclusion on coverage for short-term mental health inpatient treatment. The move, he said, is just one part of a longer “battle over mental health parity in the United States.”

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Peter Groeneveld said, in response to news of cheaper cardiac devices abroad, that a patient’s out-of-pocket costs are more a function of one’s insurance plan than one’s choice of hospital. “It’s not clear that U.S. patients can do much with this information … other than move to Europe,” said Groeneveld.