The Health Care Blog

PHARMA: Merck withdraws Vioxx

More on this later but this is a stunner. Merck hits 8-yr. low on worldwide withdrawal of Vioxx, its Cox-2 inhibitor. No word on its direct competitor Celebrex (from Pfizer) as yet, but there have been criticisms in the recent...

POLICY: Lifespan crisis hits supersize America

Travelling and having too late a night tonight to post properly, but go look at this article about health care in America from the "liberal" UK pespective: Lifespan crisis hits supersize America

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS/PROVIDERS: Michael Porter sinking into the healthcare quagmire

So the nice folks at Harvard Business School publishing invited me to attend the Michael Porter virtual seminar, and very interesting it was too. Porter says that the overall problem is that we haven't defined health care as the delivery...

POLICY: Kerry v Bush, the AMA News' take

There's a not bad description of the different proposals from Bush (what there is of one) and Kerry about health policy from the AMA News this week. It gets it about right on several of the key points, not the...

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS/PHARMA: The Public Health Press on the Medicareless -- Formu-hilarity

Go read Ross' fun piece on who's winning in the Pharma vs Insurer death match. It's called Medicareless: Formu-hilarity

POLITICS: Prop 72, Califorina's pay or play, looks good for now

California voters haven't seen much yet about the pay or play bill that Prop 72 represents. However, when read the text of the propsition over the phone by the LA Times' pollsters, 51% say they like it, while only 29%...

POLITICS: Health Care in the 2004 Presidential Election

The New England Journal of Medicine has a Bob Blendon special on politics and the election and it provides the proof in what I said a few weeks back. (And it's fully available online without payment). Health care is issue...

QUALITY: Patient safety -- we're still waiting and getting impatient

iHealthbeat reports that a couple of patient safety bills are stuck in Congress with little prospect of getting out. Basically the House version would allow errors reported to be used in legal proceedings, while the Senate version would not. The...

BLOGS: Blogger boggered?

Blogger is being very testy today..... I've got it working now but so late in the day that posting will have to wait until tomorrow.

POLICY/PHARMA: "Producers" comment on how much we should spend on health care.

The casual reader who's been following the health care system and the election--which has had a touch of health care injected into its rhetoric recently--might believe that a nation spending 15% of its GDP on health care, while having a...

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: Plans challenge Commonwealth Fund position on CDHPs

You'll recall that the Commonwealth Fund has been featured on THCB as a bastion of opposition to the idea that CDHPs will lead to nirvana, and that people who join them may skip out on needed services. Well now a...

QUALITY: Comprehensive 'pay for performance' article

Other than (probably falsely, but if someone knows the truth please tell me) claiming that I was in the group that back in 1997 invented the expression in a health care context, THCB readers will also know that I am...

THCB PLUG: Upcoming Michael Porter event

The good folks at Harvard Business School Publishing are getting into the field of audio conferences. They've bribed me with a free pass to their first one so long as I mentioned it to you, and that I've accepted gives...

THCB NOTES: FierceHealthcare Newsletter

Your host here has picked up another gig which is pretty complementary with TCHB. I'm now editing the new FierceHealthcare newsletter. This is a free newsletter each weekday emailed out around 12 noon EST which captures the gist of the...

QUALITY: More problems at Tenet sub-contractor

A little more scuttle-butt from my source on that Tenet sub-contractor THCB wrote about a while back. Disarray abounds at the small healthcare IT company that Tenet has chosen to support its Core Measures JCAHO submission requirements. The company recently...

POLITICS/POLICY: Harris Poll Shows Tight Presidential Race

As I've saying for a while, this Presidential race remains too close to call, and today my favorite polling organization confirms that. A Harris Poll taken late last weekend showed Bush and Kerry tied. Why believe Harris? Well aside from...

POLICY/POLITICS: Which Californians care about Prop 72?

So the mudslinging has begun with the No on 72 crowd calling it a government takeover of the health care system in California. Prop 72 is an up or down popular vote on the SB2 "Pay or Play" passed last...

PHARMA: The debate on R & D spending, with UPDATE

Following the revival of the "taxpayer pays for the drugs twice" line by Marcia Angell, there's an excellent article and series of comments in Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline blog on the subject of paying for R&D. Derek has somewhat...

POLICY/POLITICS: My quick view on the politics of Medicare in the campaign, with brief UPDATE

There was a lot of fuss about Medicare and health care in the last few days, particularly brought up by Bush. I think this is a serious blunder on his part. Given Swift Boat and Kerry's non-position (or actually he...

CHARITY: Grenada hurricane victims appeal

In a first for THCB I'm asking readers to help the victims of Hurricane Ivan. My college friend Paula Robinson is having a great year off sailing the Caribbean with her boyfriend John. Great that is until last week when...

QUALITY/POLICY/PHARMA: More on the costs of chemo

So the fight over cancer drug reimbursement is getting quite nasty. The doctors, who as we've explained in TCHB many times, have done very well over the last decade or so by dispensing drugs and charging Medicare and private payers...

HEALTH PLANS: In Defense of HSAs, by Langdon Alger

THCB is pleased to welcome a new contributor, writing under the nom de plume Langdon Alger. Langdon works for the Feds, and THCB duly notes that Langdon has expressed the usual disclaimer of government employees who speak their own minds,...

POLICY: Rebuttal and rebuke from The Industry Veteran on free (or not) markets and (legal) drug trade

And you thought all the verbal jousting was happening in the swing states. We at THCB find that nothing gets the blood and vituperation flowing as much as talk about drugs and money changing hands, such as these contributions from...

POLICY: International comparisons, or "How does Japan do it?" revisited

Prompted by a couple of posts from my favorite medical bloggers Robert Centor at Medrants and Sydney Smith at Medpundit, I've gone back to my old files (and I mean old). When I was a grad student I spent a...

PHARMA/POLICY: A couple of views on single payer and reimportation, by Terry Nugent & Joe Crea

Today THCB gets turned over to some contributors who may not agree with me on much but do have sensible arguments. First off Terry Nugent wasn't too impressed by the pleas of the Canadian businesses (reported by Paul Krugman) echoed...

QUALITY/PHARMA: Chemosensitivity Testing and its relation to the Chemotherapy Drug Concession, by Greg Pawelski

Contributor Gregory Pawelski is back with another look at the chemotherapy market. He's writing about a wrinkle in the use of chemo drugs that has some big implications. The Sept 1 Press release at this site has the science behind...

PHARMA: I guess GSK's not reading THCB

A couple of days ago I posted a long piece about what big pharma might do to get itself out of the bind it's in over reimportation. My suggestions included bending somewhat on reimportation and taking the high road on...

HEALTH PLANS: The power of THCB! Ooh, can't you just feel it...

While GSK apparently isn't bending to my whim, the same may not be true in Oakland. The correspondent who cajoled me into writing about the Kaiser Thrive campaign points out that: If you need some quick affirmation of your own...

QUALITY: Betsy Lehman redux, patient safety crisis continues

I was gobsmacked when I heard this on the local news today. A patient at San Mateo Medical Center (San Mateo is the small county immediately south of San Francisco and north of Silicon Valley/San Jose) died after being given...

POLICY: The Wall Street Journal likes HSAs in theory, but they're in trouble in practice

Surprise, surprise the intellectual geniuses at the Wall Street Journal editorial pages have decided that they like the HSA concept and that HSAs could help address problems in the U.S. health care system. Well they are entitled to their theoretical...

POLICY: Great Flash animation on Single Payer

Graham Walker (of Gross Anatomy fame) has created an excellent Flash animation to explain single payer to the masses. Go take a look and if you don't agree, how about creating your own about HSAs, innovation, managed competition or whatever....

PHARMA: The real debate behind reimportation

So to continue from last week's rant on reimportation, I got an email from the subject of the rant Stephen Chang. (And correcting something I said in my original post Stephen's group does have a website Cures California.org (I just...

QUALITY: DSM--Alive and kicking?

A while back I wrote about the VA and its care management program and in that post I noted that DSM appeared to be getting bigger but wasn't sure as to whether it was a big deal. I took that...