[afro-nets] Health Affairs on Global Health Priorities

[Kathleen Ford <kford@projecthope.org>]

Health Affairs' March/April Issue on Global Health Priorities
-------------------------------------------------------------

Premier Health Policy Journal Launches Comprehensive Initiative
To Spotlight Global Health

What's in the March/April issue?
http://content.healthaffairs.org/current.shtml

As Health Affairs approaches its twenty-fifth anniversary, it is
well positioned to "become a more active force" in global health
issues, writes John K. Iglehart, founding editor of Health Af-
fairs, in an editorial. He points out that the journal's founder
and publisher, Project HOPE, operates health programs around the
world and that saving lives in poor countries is also central to
the journal's mission. "With the support of the Gates Founda-
tion, we are eager to spotlight policy research that assists in
the fight to improve global health," Iglehart says. "Good policy
is as important as good science for saving lives."

Drug fast-track review proposal. Also in the March/April issue,
David Ridley and colleagues offer a proposal to encourage drug
companies to develop treatments for neglected diseases by offer-
ing "vouchers" that could be used to accelerate the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration's (FDA's) review of a blockbuster drug
intended primarily for rich-country markets. Such transferable
priority-review vouchers would be a win-win benefit, offering
"faster access to blockbuster drugs in developed countries and
faster access to cures for infectious diseases in developing
countries," according to Ridley and colleagues at Duke Univer-
sity.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/313

Should Americans seek treatment abroad? Other internationally
oriented articles in the March/April issue focus primarily on
the wealthier nations of the developed world. For instance, the
World Bank's Aaditya Mattoo argues that the failure of U.S.
health insurance policies to cover care received abroad is pre-
venting the substantial savings that could come with freer trade
in health care. Mattoo and Randeep Rathindran of HDR/HLB Deci-
sion Economics say that savings could amount to $1.4 billion an-
nually if only one in ten U.S. patients chose to receive treat-
ment abroad for one of fifteen relatively straightforward proce-
dures, such as knee surgeries, hysterectomies, and cataract ex-
tractions.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/358

Does the U.S. face a physician shortage? On the domestic front,
the March/April Health Affairs offers some challenges to conven-
tional wisdom. For example, Dartmouth's David Goodman and his
colleagues question the new consensus that the United States
faces an impending physician shortage. As evidence, Goodman and
colleagues offer a threefold variation in the amount of physi-
cian care given to patients at different academic medical cen-
ters in the last six months of life. They write that this varia-
tion is related to regional variations in physician supply,
rather than any effects on the well-being of the patient. They
assert that we should use our resources on replicating the effi-
cient care offered by interdisciplinary practices such as the
Mayo Clinic, rather than training more physicians who will only
generate increased costs for the health system.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/521

Drug development costs. Salomeh Kehanyi and colleagues dispute
the argument often made by the drug industry that longer drug
development times are behind rising pharmaceutical prices. They
present evidence that development times have generally been de-
creasing, and they say that drugs with potentially high sales
took a year less to develop than other drugs.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/461

On the other hand, Christopher Adams and Van Branter of the Fed-
eral Trade Commission found the average cost of developing a new
drug to be $868 million, slightly higher even than the much-
debated $802 million estimate offered in 2003 by Joseph DiMasi
and colleagues. However, the FTC authors also found wide varia-
tions in development costs, some attributable to strategic
choices by drugmakers themselves.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/420

Health care and the hurricanes of 2005. Finally, a special sec-
tion of Narrative Matters titled "Witness to Disaster" tells
first-person stories of the aftermath of the fall 2005 Gulf
Coast hurricanes. Patients, local clinicians and officials, and
volunteers who came from all over the country relate experiences
that generally never made headlines but often made the differ-
ence between life and death.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/extract/25/2/478

An online supplement updates what life in New Orleans is like in
March 2006, as well as providing photographs of the destruction.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/25/2/478/DC1