By Kelsey Berry It’s time to talk about discrimination again — this time, in insurance benefit design. A recent study in NEJM by Jacobs and Sommers has coined the term “adverse tiering” to describe the use of drug formularies by insurers “not to influence enrollees’ drug utilization but rather to deter certain people from enrolling…
By Nicole Hassoun Ebola is ravaging parts of Africa, yet it is not the worst health problem facing people in the region. Millions more are infected with and die every year from diseases like malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS because they cannot access the essential medicines they need. To change this, we need to understand where…
Join us for an important public forum: Constitutional Implications of Ebola:Civil Liberties & Civil Rights In Times of Health Crises This public forum addresses the constitutional and public health implications of Ebola response in the United States. According to state and federal laws, patient information is deemed private and is to be held in strict…
By Emily Largent The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) recently conducted a survey of gay and bisexual men in the U.S. focusing on attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with HIV/AIDS. The survey results, released Thursday, can be found here. I was most interested in the finding that only a quarter of those surveyed know about PrEP (pre-exposure…
The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory…
By Zachary Shapiro Hello from the Post-Trial Responsibilities conference! I will be live blogging session 2: where speakers will be providing important perspectives on PTA. Barbra Bierer is monitoring the discussion. We started with Richard Klein calling in from FDA: Richard is talking about post-trial responsibilities. He points out that there is a justice issue…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Today, the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center (MRCT) at Harvard University and the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School are co-hosting a daylong conference on “Post-Trial Responsibilities: Ethics and Implementation.” We’ll be live blogging the conference here at Bill of Health, and video/slides from the conference will be available soon. The conference…
By Dov Fox The Guardian and L.A. Times are the latest major news organizations to decry trans-Atlantic restrictions on blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM). The case against such categorical bans has been reignited by an influential piece that Bill of Health editor Glenn Cohen recently published with co-authors Jeremy Feigenbaum and Eli Adashi in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Cohen,…
By Bob Bohrer An interesting development, reported in FiercePharma and originally by Reuters, on litigation between AbbVie and GlaxoSmithKline over AbbVie’s price increases on one of its combination drugs for HIV– the FiercePharma link is here.
By Nir Eyal On Wednesday, South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced that, as of January 2015, HIV-positive patients in the country would start receiving free antiretroviral treatment once their CD4 count fell below 500, instead of current threshold of less than 350. Some patient groups would start receiving antiretrovirals immediately upon being diagnosed with…
