Journal ArticleDOI
How Medicare’s Payment Cuts For Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs Changed Patterns Of Treatment
TLDR
It is found that changes to payment rates for chemotherapy drugs administered on an outpatient basis actually increased the likelihood that lung cancer patients received chemotherapy, and the type of chemotherapy agents administered changed.Abstract:
The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, enacted in 2003, substantially reduced payment rates for chemotherapy drugs administered on an outpatient basis starting in January 2005. We assessed how these reductions affected the likelihood and setting of chemotherapy treatment for Medicare beneficiaries with newly diagnosed lung cancer, as well as the types of agents they received. Contrary to concerns about access, we found that the changes actually increased the likelihood that lung cancer patients received chemotherapy. The type of chemotherapy agents administered also changed. Physicians switched from dispensing the drugs that experienced the largest cuts in profitability, carboplatin and paclitaxel, to other high-margin drugs, like docetaxel. We do not know what the effect was on cancer patients, but these changes may have offset some of the savings projected from passage of the legislation. The ultimate message is that payment reforms have real consequences and should be undertaken with caution.read more
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Book
Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis
TL;DR: A committee of experts to examine the quality of cancer care in the United States and formulate recommendations for improvement presents the committee’s findings and recommendations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care
Thomas J. Smith,Bruce E. Hillner +1 more
TL;DR: The authors provide data-driven proposals that have the potential to save money without compromising patient care and are likely to be implemented in the coming year.
Journal ArticleDOI
Pricing in the Market for Anticancer Drugs
TL;DR: Using an original dataset of 58 anticancer drugs approved between 1995 and 2013, it is found that launch prices, adjusted for inflation and drugs’ survival benefits, increased by 10%, or about $8,500, per year.
Posted Content
Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care
TL;DR: A model of patient demand and supplier behavior is developed to explain parallel trends in technology growth and cost growth in the United States, showing that health care productivity depends on the heterogeneity of treatment effects across patients, the shape of the health production function, and the cost structure of procedures such as MRIs with high fixed costs and low marginal costs.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Comparison of four chemotherapy regimens for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer.
Joan H. Schiller,David P. Harrington,Chandra P. Belani,Corey J. Langer,Alan B. Sandler,James E. Krook,Junming Zhu,David H. Johnson +7 more
TL;DR: None of four chemotherapy regimens offered a significant advantage over the others in the treatment of advanced non-small-cell lung cancer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Molecular origins of cancer: Lung cancer
TL;DR: From the Departments of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology and Clinical Cancer Prevention, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.
Journal ArticleDOI
Weekly Paclitaxel in the Adjuvant Treatment of Breast Cancer
Joseph A. Sparano,Joseph A. Sparano,Molin Wang,Silvana Martino,Vicky Jones,Edith A. Perez,Tom Saphner,Antonio C. Wolff,George W. Sledge,William C. Wood,Nancy E. Davidson +10 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the efficacy of two different taxanes, docetaxel and paclitaxel, given either weekly or every 3 weeks, in the adjuvant treatment of breast cancer was compared.
Journal ArticleDOI
Physician response to fee changes with multiple payers
Thomas G. McGuire,Mark V. Pauly +1 more
TL;DR: This paper develops a general model of physician behavior with demand inducement encompassing the two benchmark cases of profit maximization and target-income behavior that is used to derive own and cross-price expressions for the response of physicians to fee changes in the realistic context of more than one payer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Frequency and Cost of Chemotherapy-Related Serious Adverse Effects in a Population Sample of Women With Breast Cancer
TL;DR: Chemotherapy-related serious adverse effects among younger, commercially insured women with breast cancer may be more common than reported by large clinical trials and lead to more patient suffering and health care expenditures than previously estimated.