Health

A paper by Proudman et al. (2024) finds that doing so would be extremely expensive. Including all preclinical, clinical and post-approval R&D activities, total annual costs to maintain the average lifecycle level of 49.4 approved drugs across all disease areas during the 2018–22 period was estimated to be $139.6 billion. Including only pre-launch costs, total…

Texas is moving to allow for more freedom of choice with respect to receipt of vaccines. The Economist reports: Texas legislators meeting in Austin, the state capital, are debating new laws to relax vaccine rules, urged on by Texans for Vaccine Choice (TFVC). On February 18th activists in “Come and Make Me” shirts took to…

In Feedspot’s 2025 rankings, Healthcare Economist was once again ranked in the top 100 economics blog (#44). I was also ranked as the #4 top health economics blog of 2025 as well. You can see their full economics blog rankings here.

Health economics and outcomes research has already started to use AI tools such as large language models (LLM) across a diverse set of study types, including systematic literature reviews (SLR), health economic modelling (HEM) and real-world evidence (RWE). In SLRs, LLMs can assist with abstract and full-text screening, bias assessment, data extraction, and automating meta-analysis…

One reason are the administrative obstacles and frictions that eligible individuals have to overcome to receive the public services. A paper by Herd and Moynihan (2025) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives provides an overview of the literature. Such burdens are the experience of policy implementation as onerous, and arise via learning costs (knowing about…