MDNews - Minnesota

The Debt Divide A Push for Drug Price Transparency ROI on Mental Health Treatment G R E AT E R W O R L D W I D E I N V E S T M E N T in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders can more than pay for itself, according to research in The Lancet Psychiatry. Reduced economic output related to those disorders totals as much as $8.5 trillion annually. It would cost about $147 billion to generate substantial improvement in treat- ment from 2016 to 2030 across 36 countries that represent 80 percent of the world's population, the researchers state. However, that investment would yield enhanced productivity totaling $230 billion among patients with depression and $169 billion among patients with anxiety disorders. The researchers estimate an additional $310 billion return on investment from 43 million added years of healthy life. "[R]esulting benefi t to cost ratios amount to 2.3–3.0 to 1 when economic benefi ts only are considered, and 3.3–5.7 to 1 when the value of health returns is also included," they write. ■ — By Steve Barrett A K A I S E R F A M I LY F O U N D A T I O N poll in 2015 suggested nearly three-fourths of Americans consider drug prices unjustifi ably high. Citing concerns about negative percep- tions of drug pricing, the Health and Public Policy Committee of the American College of Physicians recently offered recommendations designed to increase transparency and patient access to medications. Some of those recommendations include: + Disclosure to regulators of drugs' actual material and production costs + Disclosure of research and development costs that account for a portion of a drug's pricing + High standards of transparency regard- ing drugs developed in connection with taxpayer-funded basic research + More fl exibility by publicly funded health programs to negotiate volume discounts + Possible measures to allow reimporta- tion of U.S.-manufactured drugs, so long as their safety can be reasonably ascertained ■ — By Steve Barrett I T ' S S C A R C E L Y N E W S t h a t m e d i c a l students frequently rack up copious student loan debt. The chasm between their debt load and that of many other students may be surprising, however. C i t i n g f i g u r e s f r o m t h e N a t i o n a l Postsecondary Student Aid Study, National Public Radio placed median graduate debt for medical school students at approximately $148,000. Law school students were not far behind in that dubious ranking — about $117,000 — and pharmacy students had roughly $94,000 in debt. The amounts drop precipitously after that. A Master of Fine Arts student accumulates about $48,000 in debt, followed by $46,000 for a person who earns a doctorate in education, $24,000 for a master's in education, $20,000 for a master's in social work, $18,000 for a Master of Arts degree, $17,000 for an MBA and $9,000 for a Master of Science degree. The average graduate debt load totaled about $23,000. The fi gures represented all graduate loans for outgoing full-time graduate students but did not include strictly online or night pro- grams, nor programs at for-profi t colleges. ■ — By Steve Barrett 1 8 1 8❱❱❱❱❱ B U S I N E S S O F M E D I C I N E

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