Monday, February 27, 2017

Drug Pricing in the US

An increasingly popular topic in our national news is the pricing of pharmaceutical drugs in North America. Our drug prices increase annually and are drastically higher in almost all categories than most, if not all other developed countries. Access to healthcare and price varies depending on your location in the United States but chronic eye disease does not vary from place to place. According to new Medicare data, the way doctors treat chronic eye disease does differ from location to location and those changes have major effects on personal and US budgets.Steven Rich/The Washington Post
The map above shows the use of Lucentis a drug used to treat eye disease differs from area to area. The brightest reds show places where the vast majority of the money spent in treating the disease is spent on Lucentis; the deepest blues, shows places where most of the money spent treating the disease is spent on its cheaper alternatives.Such variety in treatment calls into question whether doctors are treating patients based on the best available evidence, or other considerations.

Rich, Steven. "These maps tell you everything that’s wrong with our drug pricing system." The Washington Post. WP Company, 11 Apr. 2014. Web. 27 Feb. 2017.

5 comments:

  1. I wonder if this data was overlayed onto a map that had geographic basemap, would any connections be made. Also, overlaying this data into a map that took in accounts of data such as relations to hospitals or average monthly income, if this would allow connections to be made.

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  2. I was wondering about that myself. Perhaps insurance policy holders vs. non-insurance policy holders, or if income demographics were overlaid, it could show some sort of a correlation? Pretty interesting. I'd like to see this done with other drugs as well.

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  3. I find this map fascinating. I wonder what it would look life if places with high drug restrictions were mapped and even overlaying a race density demographic.

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  4. My question was very similar to Emma's, but I am curious as to what other factors besides race are contributing to the difference. There appears to be no particular pattern off first glance.

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  5. I'm curious what are some of the cheaper alternatives like are they something that doesn't work as well or are they generic forms of the pill which are actually cheaper.

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