Rising Healthcare Costs | What are the Biggest Challenges?

 

Welcome to the Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit podcast series. Joining us today is Robert Popovian, Senior Director, US Government Relations, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. 

Download the complete podcast & transcript here.

What are the biggest challenges that you face presently with rising healthcare costs?

Robert: Well, healthcare costs are increasing. We are close to about 20% of our GDP is spent on healthcare expenditures and that number is going to continuously go up, just because of the demographics in the United States.

If you look at spending and healthcare in general with regards to pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical spending has risen slowly and overall healthcare spending – as well as other healthcare segments in the last few years – and the price increases have been pretty much in line with the other segments of healthcare.

The challenge that we have with healthcare expenditures in the United States is that we have a very dysfunctional payment mechanism in the US where we are challenged with an outdated insurance policy model where we don’t necessarily pay for the best interventions in healthcare because of the mechanisms of reimbursement where we have pharmaceuticals vs. hospital payments vs. outpatient payments vs. other services being paid separately. Because of that, no one cost beneficial intervention is the one that is put in the front of the others.


To hear more from Robert, please join him at IIR's Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit, September 15-17 in Boston. Also, you can save an EXTRA $100 off the current rate when registering with the code: XP1968BLOG - Register now. 

See you in Boston!

Oncology Management Podcast Series with Bill McGivney

Welcome to the Oncology Management Podcast Series - Presented by IIR's Annual Summit for Oncology Management. Joining us today is Bill McGivney, Principal, McGivney Global Advisory LLC & former CEO, National Comprehensive Cancer Network

Download the complete podcast & transcript here.

To begin, could you please comment on what appears to be a seemingly never-ending call to define value in healthcare?

Bill: To answer your question about the definition of value in healthcare, you know I really do continue to be amazed at the calls that come out of national committee meetings and publications, etc. to say that we continue to have to define and develop a national standard for what value is in the healthcare system. To me, it seems really simple. I mean, I’ve been around the healthcare system for almost 30 years now. The value is the clinical benefit derived by patients, specifically, for the expenditure of a specified amount of healthcare dollars. That’s pretty simple. Sometimes when people try to develop these long equations to which I’ve seen, it’s a gust of bodies when they have their conferences. I mean, I saw one once years ago and I just commented to the moderator of the session that one, the long equations for the definition of cost effectiveness was mind-numbing and two, it would never see the light of day. I was right on both accounts. 

So, I think my simple definition is pervasive in terms of this is what value is. It’s really, again, the clinical patient benefit that’s obtained for a specified expenditure of healthcare dollars.

Download the rest of the Podcast here.

To hear more from Bill, please join us at IIR’s Annual Oncology Management Summit, July 21-23 in Philadelphia, PA.

To save 15% off your registration rate, use the code: XP1914BLOG

Register Now!