Lessons from Massachusetts Healthcare Reform
I recently attended the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) annual meeting in Philadelphia. “Health Journalism 2011″ offered the opportunity to hear speakers on a wide range of topics.
One presentation that by chance I attended was on what we can learn from Massachusetts, where a law was passed two years ago requiring individual healthcare insurance. Many of the features of the MA law were incorporated into the Affordable Care Act that will impact everyone in the United States.
I have used Storify to aggregate some of the live Tweets from the session, and I hope this captures the essence of what the panel presented.
Source: redrawn from FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) presentation. The data in my opinion is a little ambiguous as to the true state of the Pharma industry. While the number of applications declined last year to a five year low of 23, from a previous 5 year high in 2009 of 37, the number of NME approvals at 21 was only just below the 5 year average of 22.