Health
Health and pharma
A health market is almost never a medical question. It is a question about an agency: which one publishes the number, on what schedule, under which definition, and what the decision does to a price.
Health looks like the domain where a layperson has no business having an opinion, and that instinct is wrong in a specific way. The medicine is hard; the market is not usually asking about the medicine. It is asking whether a regulator signs by a date, whether a published count crosses a line, or whether a declaration gets made - and each of those runs on a procedure with a calendar, a legal standard and a named official. The procedure is public even where the science is not.
That distinction decides most of these markets. A drug can work and still miss its date, because the deciding event is a review clock and a manufacturing inspection rather than a trial result. A pathogen can spread and the count still land short, because the count includes only cases confirmed under a particular definition and reported through a particular channel. Reading the procedure beats having a view on the biology.
The financial side is where the domain earns its place next to the others. A pricing law rewrites the revenue of an entire sector, a single approval moves a company more than a quarter of earnings does, and a supply constraint on one injectable decides whether a market about coverage resolves at all. Each entry here follows that chain to the end: what the decision is, who makes it, when, and what moves when it lands.
Outbreak case counts
A market asking whether measles cases pass a number is not asking how many people caught measles. It is asking what one federal web page says on one date - and that page has a cutoff, a definition and a revision history.
Open entryPandemic declarations
There is no button marked pandemic. The International Health Regulations create exactly one instrument, and it is not called that - which makes the wording of these contracts the whole trade.
Open entryDrug approvals
Most approval markets are arithmetic wearing a lab coat. A submission date plus a filing period plus a review goal produces a decision window, and the window answers the question long before the science does.
Open entryObesity drugs
Two companies, one drug class, and more revenue than most industries. What decides the next leg is not a molecule - it is a formulary, a price and a review clock.
Open entryDrug pricing policy
For most of this library, price is what supply and demand settle on. Here it is what a statute, an executive order and a tariff schedule settle on - three instruments, all live at once, pulling in different directions.
Open entryHealth insurers and CMS
For a large health insurer, the single most important price of the year is not negotiated with a customer. It is published by a federal agency on a date known years in advance - twice, and the two numbers do not match.
Open entry
How these markets resolve
- A regulator's published decision on its own docket - an approval letter, a complete response letter, or a decision date passing without either.
- A number in an official surveillance series at a stated cutoff, under the case definition that series uses rather than the one in the reporting.
- A formal declaration by a named body under a named legal instrument, such as a public health emergency of international concern.
- A rule or payment rate published in a government register on its scheduled date, which is what turns a policy debate into a price.