Reviewing health systems

Spain Health system review

The series Health systems in transition by WHO is a helful source to understand the current state of healthcare. Now you can red the updated version for Spain. Check p.68 and you'll have to reduce the number of members with private insurance by 1.5m, because income protection products have been added,, and they don't reflect health insurance, they are "income insurance". Anyway, in p.61 you'll find the size of administrative costs, 3%. This is one of the reasons why the spanish health system is so cheap. But if you split between private and public you get the following: private insurance premiums are 10% approx of public expenditure, and represent half of administrative costs.I know that the estimation is quite difficult, but anyway, this is what the table says.
A big effort and a very helpful text for anyone interested in understanding the health system.

Khan el-Khalili based drug pricing

When is it too expensive? Cost-effectiveness thresholds and health care decision-making

In one week of difference, the same technology: CAR T-cells has had two different options for drug pricing. Last week, under NICE review the answer was no to Gilead, and yesterday was yes to Novartis. The first paradigm applied to Yescarta is well known: marginal effectiveness should be acceptable at an affordable cost (NICE). The second one applied to Kymriah is based on preferences and willingness to pay under confidential prices. It is also a well known system specially at bazaars like Khan el-Khalili in Cairo.
This is an example of how two systems are applied in practice and nobody cares about it. I'm concerned about transparency, and that's why I can't understand why with public money the expenditure is confidential. I would agree if somebody explain the budget impact that have been agreed, otherwise with public money Kahn el-Khalili system is not acceptable. After more than four decades, Torrance would ask himself if all this effort on cost-effectiveness analysis has had any sense to arrive at this point.
Anyway, the remaining question is: when is too expensive? This is precisely what this editorial asks. And the and the answer (?) is:

For deciding whether something is too expensive, thresholds are crucial. Depending on which perspective is taken, the word ‘threshold’ may either refer to the consumption value of health or the marginal cost-effectiveness of current spending. 

This is a standard health economics perspective that no health politician nowadays will buy. Right now they are not buying the idea, and I think that they prefer confidential prices. It allows to reflect power,  discretionality, or even worse arbitrariness. Khan el-Khalili system has won.

A controversial view of epigenetic inheritance

A critical view on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans

A new article in Nature suggest that more evidence is needed to ascertain the role of epigenetic inheritance.

Even if the molecular mechanisms exist to transmit epigenetic information across generations in humans, it is very likely that the transgenerational transmission of culture by communication, imitation, teaching and learning surpasses the effects of epigenetic inheritance and our ability to detect this phenomenon. Cultural inheritance has certainly had an adaptive role in the evolution of our species, but the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, as laid out above, is not (yet) conclusive. 

Let's wait for new evidence...