The United States spends considerably more per capita on prescription drugs than other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Drawing on the Intercontinental Medical Statistics Midas database, we examined the variation in drug prices among selected OECD countries in 2005, 2007, and 2010 to determine which country paid the highest prices for brandname drugs, what factors led to variation in per capita drug spending, and what factors contributed to the rate of increase in drug spending. We found that depending on how prices were weighted for volume across the countries, brand-name prescription drug prices were 5-198 percent higher in the United States than in the other countries in all three study years. (A limitation is that many negotiated price discounts obtained in the United States may not be fully reflected in the results of this study.) A contributor to higher US per capita drug spending is faster uptake of new and more expensive prescription drugs in the United States relative to other countries. In contrast, the other OECD countries employed mechanisms such as health technology assessment and restrictions on patients' eligibility for new prescription drugs, and they required strict evidence of the value of new drugs. Similarly, US health care decision makers could consider requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide more evidence about the value of new drugs in relation to the cost and negotiating prices accordingly.
The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed many lives in the UK and globally. The objective of this paper is to study whether the number of deaths not registered as Covid-19-related has increased compared to what would have been expected in the absence of the pandemic. Reasons behind this might include Covid-19 underreporting, avoiding visits to hospitals or GPs, and the effects of the lockdown. I used weekly ONS data on the number of deaths in England and Wales that did not officially involve Covid-19 over the period 2015–2020. Simply observing trends is not sufficient as spikes in deaths may occasionally occur. I thus followed a difference-in-differences econometric approach to study whether there was a relative increase in deaths not registered as Covid-19-related during the pandemic, compared to a control. Results suggest that there were an additional 968 weekly deaths that officially did not involve Covid-19, compared to what would have otherwise been expected. It is possible that some people are dying from Covid-19 without being diagnosed, and/or that there are excess deaths due to other causes as a result of the pandemic. Analysing the cause of death for any excess non-covid-19 deaths will shed light upon the reasons for the increase in such deaths and will help design appropriate policy responses to save lives.
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