The Health Care Blog

BLOGGING: Christmas & Holiday blogging

I'm still in the UK and I may get to another post before Christmas, but then again I may not, and next week will be beyond spotty...there are a couple of articles in the queue but they may not make...

PHARMA: Industry Veteran on Don Johnson's ideas on saving Merck

Don Johnson at the BusinessWord blog had a long piece on how Merck might be turned around. I personally think that the cause is pretty hopeless, and that like many other once great companies, Merck will just have to accept...

BlOGS: New health care blogs

Joe Padua has a new-ish blog called Managed Care Matters and there's a new team blog on the ills of the health care system by a group of academics called HCRenewal. Both worth a look!

PHARMA: Don Johnson on how to save Merck

I'm not sure Merck is salvageable. My assumption is that its sales force is worth something, as is Fossamax, and that a shotgun marriage with another pharma with a better pipeline is in the offing. But Don Johnson from The...

POLICY: Medicare dis-Advantaged?

A couple of weeks back I suggested that the Medicare CCIP (disease management) demonstration projects were designed at least in part to get private health plans (and the DSM companies that contract with them) involved in the wider management of...

QUALITY: Is pre-chemo testing the future? by Harvey Frey MD

Careful readers of this blog will have noted that along with reporting about the change in reimbursement for cancer drugs (and to get the real scoop on that you should see JD Klienke's excellent article in Health Affairs), there's also...

THCB UPDATE

Sadly, no posts from Matthew over the next few days. He's on his way back to the UK for the holidays and having laptop problems, so his latest series of missives will be delayed.

BLOGS: Italics for anyone?

For some strange reason Blogger would not publish for hours today. And then when it did, everything became italicized.....sorry! (Unless you like it that way!)

PHARMA: Fee-based distribution

Pharma wholesalers used to make their mark-up on tiny price changes. Like a Walmart, they'd buy now, sell later and pay their suppliers even later. As the suppliers were the hugely profitable pharma companies who made huge margins on each...

HOSPITALS/POLICY: Matt Quinn on California staffing ratios contention

Last week our beloved Governor must have thought that he's wondered into a John Leslie movie. 3,000 nurses protested his visit to a women's conference (no less), and he told his audience that "I kick their butts" and that nurses--the...

QUALITY: Gordon Norman on DSM, Medicare and Oliver Stone & me

Last week there was remarkably little fuss in the health care press about the introduction of the new Medicare CCIP (DM-type) programs. I suggested that provider groups had been left out of the running when these programs were awarded. Gordon...

POLICY/ETHICS: Follow up to the Dutch euthanasia issue

Well I've spent some time emailing with Sydney at Medpundit about her original article and she's also received support from Enoch at Medmusings and Dr Bob at The Doctor Is In. All three are coming at this (I presume) from...

BLOGS: Other stuff that's worth a look

Between the back and forth with Medpundit and the DSM stuff I've had to be all too brief on some other great stuff. But it's worth taking a look at Dr. Ron Grelsamer's new Knee Hip Pain Blog, which has...

POLICY: Medpundit totally misreads the euthanasia debate in Europe, and is incredibly insulting to boot.

I tread gently around criticizing Sydney at Medpundit because her blog is so good even if her politics are increasingly "out of the mainstream" and the evidence she uses to support them is often incomplete, nay baffling. (See this piece...

PHARMA: Overdosed America's Abramson on CSPAN

John Abramson MD has an excellent book out called Overdosed America in which he criticizes pharma, the FDA and the medical journals for, at the least, bending the truth. To get a flavor of it, read the piece he wrote...

QUALITY: Medicare DSM demos are awarded, but not to providers

So the Medicare CCIP (chronic care improvement program) demonstration projects have been awarded and announced. And the winners are health plans and DSM companies. The plans are Aetna, Cigna, Humana, & United. The DSM companies are the more or less...

POLITICS/TECHNOLOGY: A photo essay of unnecessary carnage

The war in Iraq recently passed another grim milestone. 1,000 Americans have died in combat. Many of them are national guardsmen who joined up for the college money. Had they been told that they had a good chance of going...

HOSPITALS; King/Drew--putting a failure in context. Part 1

Today's fourth of five pieces in the LA Times on King/Drew medical center is called How whole departments fail a hospital's patients and it's probably the most horrific of the series so far. It starts with the widely reported case...

HOSPITALS: More on King-Drew

The LA Times series on King-Drew continues with another raking expose about One doctor's long trail of dangerous mistakes. I'll be back with more on this later today.

TECHNOLOGY: J&J continues winning diversification strategy

Unfortunately this stock picker wasn't paying much attention, but there were some signs that this would happen. Last week a Prudential analyst thought that Guidant was the top pick in medical devices, while the NY Times had a story late...

HOSPITALS: Trying to put King/Drew in context

There's a really interesting series in the LA Times about King/Drew Medical Center. The first article is called Deadly errors and politics betray a hospital's promise, and the second is called Underfunding is a myth, but the squandering is real....

PHARMA: Cynical thought for the day

On December 8th medical students across the nation are going to protest overly intrusive marketing from drug reps. I can't help wondering that, given the relative geekiness and terrible work hours of medical students/residents and the typical physical characteristics of...

PHARMA: Atlas is not impressed by the Illinois reimporter

Regular contributor, and one of several token free-marketer contributors to this deeply socialist blog, Atlas, does not like what he sees from the apparently failing effort of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to enroll anyone in the campaign to buy drugs...

QUALITY: Wachter agrees that patient safety is only marginally improving

Somewhat beating a dead horse, five years and one day after To Err is Human, UCSF patient safety expert (and by definition rebel physician) Robert Wachter has a paper in Health Affairs in which he (using a survey of 400...

POLITICS: Prop. 72 actually did lose

So apparently Prop 72 really did lose and all the fuss was a clerical error. Pity that 45 million uninsured Americans isn't a clerical error.

POLICY/INDUSTRY: Costs -- The rate of increase decreases, but not enough to spoil everyone's party, with UPDATE

There's a confusing little piece in the WSJ about how health spending continues to rise at (a) worrying pace. It's based on a HSC report and an EBRI report about the first half of this year, which suggest that last...

POLITICS: Has Prop 72 won?

And if you weren't convinced by the exit poll debacle, the terrorist lockdown in Ohio, the trashing of the optical scan tapes in Florida, and all the other bullshit that's gone on in the electoral process (not to mention the...

HEALTH PLANS: Georgia names its price and Wellpoint/Anthem merger is done

After a little bit of modest extortion, the Georgia insurance commissioner came into line for a mere $126m, mostly to be spent on upgrading hospitals and a little for telemedicine. So hey presto, WellPoint is now the nation's new largest...