Responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and tackling so-called neglected tropical diseases are the focus of the November/December 2009 edition of Health Affairs, released today. The articles, by leading global health experts from around the world, show that although these challenges differ dramatically, rising to meet them could save millions of lives.
Health Affairs will highlight the issue’s [...]

On Tuesday October 13, Darius Lakdawalla was awarded Research!America’s 2009 Garfield Economic Impact Award for his paper “U.S. Pharmaceutical Policy In A Global Marketplace,” published in Health Affairs, December 16, 2008. 
Lakdawalla is director of research, Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, and associate professor, School of Policy, Planning and Development, at the University of Southern [...]

In a recent Health Affairs Web Exclusive, researchers document for the first time that trade rules reduce access to generic drugs in a low-income country. Using recent Ministry of Health data, they report that in Guatemala, some generics have been withdrawn from the market while others have been denied entry altogether due to intellectual property [...]

Editor’s Note: During his 47 years in the Senate, the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was a lion of U.S. health care and health policy. We at Health Affairs, along with much of the rest of America, grieve at his passing.  We recently asked Democratic and Republican politicians, policy experts, and former Senate staff [...]

Editor’s Note: During his 47 years in the Senate, the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was a lion of U.S. health care and health policy. We at Health Affairs, along with much of the rest of America, grieve at his passing.  We recently asked Democratic and Republican politicians, policy experts, and former Senate staff [...]

Global health issues, especially those affecting the world’s poor, rarely gain anywhere near the attention that the U.S. public and policymakers give to domestic concerns.  However, in one small corner of the current health reform discussion, there is a golden opportunity not only to reduce U.S. health care costs but also to improve the health [...]

Many more people are using mental health services and U.S. mental health spending rose 65 percent in the past decade, but there is still a disturbingly large gap between access to care and quality of mental health care received. These are some of the findings discussed in the May/June issue of Health Affairs — Mental [...]

National health care spending grew at its lowest rate in nearly a decade in 2007, largely as a result of slower spending on prescription drugs, according to a report by government analysts published today in the new January/February 2009 issue of Health Affairs. The analysts from the National Health Statistics Group in the CMS Office [...]

Editor’s Note: In an interview published this week, Health Affairs Contributing Editor Barbara Culliton asks Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Associate Commissioner For Science, Norris Alderson, about his agency’s regulation of nanomedicine and the potential for health care cost savings. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation:
Barbara Culliton: Nanomedicine is the “next big thing” in medicine, [...]

From its inception, the Medicare Modernization Act has simmered with the contradictions implicit in its mixed parentage. It is at once the most ambitious new U.S. human welfare program of the millenium; and at the same time a great ragbag of absurdities, from the loopy benefit structure to a wilderness of obscure and convoluted arrangements [...]

Editor’s Note: Should drugmakers and medical device manufacturers be allowed to provide physicians with medical and scientific journal articles concerning uses of their products that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Recently, the FDA issued draft guidance that would permit this practice with certain regulatory restraints. In the post below, Jerome [...]

Editor’s Note: Should drugmakers and medical device manufacturers be allowed to provide physicians with medical and scientific journal articles concerning uses of their products that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Recently, the FDA issued draft guidance that would permit this practice within certain regulatory restraints. In the post below, Scott [...]

Having reviewed the latest report on national health spending in 2006 (Health Affairs, Jan/Feb 2008) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Paul Ginsburg’s commentary (“Don’t Break out the Champagne: Continued Slowing of Health Spending Growth Unlikely to Last”), I want to offer a dissenting view. Though I do not have the [...]

Full implementation of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit contributed to an 18.7 percent increase in Medicare spending in 2006, the fastest rate of growth since 1981 and double the rise in 2005, the federal government reported today. In 2006, Medicare spending rose to $401.3 billion, up from $338.0 billion a year earlier, says the [...]

It is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy that American problems require uniquely American solutions. As a solution to the lack of outpatient prescription drug coverage for the over 65s and disabled, Medicare Part D is unarguably unique. It’s also expensive, complex and awash with perverse incentives. But it is well established, and efforts to introduce greater [...]

Editor’s Note: The following letter from Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) was originally published in the September/October 2007 issue of Health Affairs. The letter describes Sen. Brownback’s use of a Health Affairs paper as the basis for his Elimination of Neglected Diseases (END) amendment to the FDA Revitalization Act. President Bush signed a version of the [...]

Tuberculosis is being a seen as a greater threat to world health now than at any time in the past half-century. The symbiosis of HIV/AIDS with TB in Africa, along with the emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR-TB) and extensively drug restistant TB (XDR-TB) have only heightened concerns in developing countries. Even in a developed country such [...]

Why are consumers encouraged — indeed virtually required — to make choices among Medicare Part D plans, but discouraged from making choices about airbags, and prohibited from choosing to accept higher wages in return for accepting certain health risks in the workplace? Why are physicians and patients allowed to take on the risks associated with [...]

Widely cited research suggesting that newer drugs “pay for themselves” is unreliable and should not guide policymakers until more valid research is undertaken, say Yuting Zhang and Stephen Soumerai of Harvard Medical School in a paper in the current issue of Health Affairs.

The readers and authors of the new Health Affairs paper “What’s More Dangerous, Your Aspirin Or Your Car? Thinking Rationally About Drug Risks (And Benefits),” by Joshua Cohen and Peter Neumann [1-week free access], have entered into a lively discussion on assessing the risks versus benefits of the drug Tysabri for patients with multiple sclerosis [...]