By Al Lewis
Last month Aon, the most important benefit consultancy firm, released a “study” that claims:
A considerable chance of reducing the costs of health care for employers and to improve the total personnel health through an extensive obesity management program that includes GLP-1 drugs.
This is of course the opposite of what most researchers have demonstrated. And in the immortal words of the great philosophers terrible streets: “Two men say they are Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” We will soon see who is wrong (eh, which means about drugs for weight loss) when we dive into the study in a minute. But let’s first look at Aon’s earlier analyzes.
A short history of Aon
Aon claimed that the award saved 8%, But it seems that they should be absent Both on the day the professor of biostatistics explained how control groups work, and also on the day that the mathematics teacher of the fifth degree explained how the average works.
She that lyra claimed – that’s one spiritual Health Company – has reached the following non-mental Improvements in the series of patients who had at least one meeting with mental health with one of their “220,000 high -quality providers”:
§ A 30% reduction in not-Mental health-related Er-visits
§ A reduction of 30% in generic drug expenditure
§ A reduction of 20% in the spending on special medicines
Partly thanks to starting the Y-axis at $ 4000 to improve optics, Aon also revealed that Lyra has achieved a very high “efficiency ratio”:
I cannot object to that finding because – despite three decades in this area, over 100 articles/interviews/quotes/quotes included the Wall Street Journal“ two commercial book and one Harvard Business School Case Study -I still do not know what an “efficiency ratio” is, except that has nothing to do with comparing participants with non-participants in a study in mental health care. Apparently one “Efficiency ratio” in health care measures how fast A hospital turns its inventory over. So Aon’s use of the term reminds of the immortal words of the great philosopher Bob Uecker: “Juuussst a little outside.”
When it was asked public and private to explain one of these things, Aon was correct. That was probably wise on their part.
Nor will they respond here because they are the Streisand Effect. (Barbra sued a photographer for photographing her Malibu -Huishuis from the air as a routine part of documenting erosion along the California coastline on behalf of the state. Six people had downloaded that image before she had charged an indictment. After she had sued them, one, one, one million People have downloaded the image. She also lost and also had to pay lawyers.)
It seems most recently that they might have had their hand Also in the PPE Cookie Jar.
Aon’s drug study for weight loss
While he admitted that the costs jump into the first year, Aon found a “bend” of 7% in the cost curve in the second year, by participants compared to a “precisely corresponding control group”. Matched -control elements, no matter how ‘accurate’, are invalid, period. That is why the FDA does not let pharmaceutical companies use them. The most famous are some very stable geniuses in the wellness industry unintentionally proven when they published this graph. They thought they demonstrated that participants in welfare programs save money versus matched non-participants. Unfortunately for them, a fleeting glance at the X-axis reveals the “total savings” of the appropriate name “treatment” Two years before the treatment startedSimply because voluntary participants are motivated.
The related problem is that most of the two-year drug users for a period of two years that Aon studied the most users have fallen from weight loss. Yet there is no account of – or mention of – Drop -Outs in this study.
Only people who still go to the drugs are counted. The others would be ‘lost for follow-up’. Only counting those who are still in the program at the end is called “survivor bias”, or the “last man standing” fallacy. That is why a program for weight loss shows great results – most people stop most programs because they do not succeed. Ironically, the greater the failure, generally the better the results among the few survivors.
It is also quite literally impossible for the costs to “bend” 7% generally By reducing the speed of heart attacks and strokes by 44%. That’s because there are just not enough of these events to do that. The speed of both is approximately 1 per 1000 in the <65 insured population. And Aon did not even claim a 44% reduction in those events. They claimed to reduce the "risk" of these events by 44%. A cynic could perceive that if he was clearly reduced actual events They would have said that against that amount.
It is not necessary to believe our word for this conclusion. We made our Weight loss Drug Economics Calculator free. Enter your own assumptions and decide yourself.
How they can determine someone’s risk of their claims is everyone’s gamble. Suppose twins have parents who died early on heart disease. The first is worried about this. He takes statins, metformin, perhaps a cardiologist, gets a stent etc. The second does nothing to reduce his genetic risk. The second is a much higher risk than the first, but the “risk score” will say the opposite. Many people don’t agree They run the risk of coronary arteries until they have an event. So how can Aon know?
What is Aon planning?
Certainly, an actuarial consultancy whose reputation is based on, well, be an actuarial consultancy, would not risk that reputation by writing articles, right?
Well, certainly not for free.
They were paid by Lyra, were paid by award and (reportedly) she was paid by Express Scripts. In this case, everyone who does not want to open the detached drug calculator of the weight loss above to find out-Sales Aon “collaborate with employers in modeling the long-term active impact of GLP-1 acceptance.”
And because their model is wrong, “working with” Aon – is again in the immortal words of Dire Straits – “money for nothing.”
Al Lewis is CEO of QuestionChairman of the Validation Institute And the noir of the wellness industry. He blogs on now and then They said what?
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