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Estimating the Effects of Pharmaceutical Innovations on Patients' Employment Outcomes
In recent years, advances in medical technologies have been a major source of the increasing cost of health care in the United States. Society and policymakers must increasingly make hard choices when allocating limited resources among competing uses, and evaluating the benefits and costs of new technologies is becoming more urgent. However, current approaches to evaluating the benefits of medical technologies often ignore employment-related benefits, thus undervaluing interventions that improve functioning and productivity among the working-age population. This dissertation reviews evidence of employment-related benefits resulting from effective treatment. The author developed a model showing that the observed incremental labor supply is a result both of more-effective treatment and of other factors such as eligibility for employment-based or public health insurance, both of which are tied to employment status. She then conducted two empirical studies to estimate the employment effects of treatment-one on the effect of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy on HIV patients' employment transitions, the other on the effect of recent improvements in pharmacological therapies for hypertension. The author concludes that when translating estimated employment effects into employment-related benefits, one must be aware of possible labor market adjustments associated with the change and base the analysis on labor market equilibria.
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Contents
Chapter One:
Introduction
Chapter Two:
Employment Effects of Pharmaceutical Innovations: A Microeconomic Model and a Critique of Previous Approaches
Chapter Three:
Effective HIV Treatment and the Employment of HIV+ Adults
Chapter Four:
Recent Drug Therapies for High Blood Pressure: Do They Help People Work More
Chapter Five:
Discussion and Conclusions
This product is part of the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) dissertation series. PRGS dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertation has been supervised, reviewed, and approved by a PRGS faculty committee overseeing the dissertation.
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