The Health Care Blog

PHARMA/QUALITY: Can Cancer Care Get Better? by Greg Pawelski

AP Biotechnology Writer, Paul Elias, wrote an article this week that described how while the cost of cancer drugs have skyrocketed, the benefits are less apparent. It's been more than 30 years since we declared a war on cancer and...

POLICY: Florida HIV mystery raises questions, by John Pluenneke

A little more than thirty days ago, a statistician at the Palm Beach Department of Health accidentally sent out an internal email containing a list with the names of more than 6,000 local residents with HIV and AIDS. Officials immediately...

INTERNATIONAL: The UK plans for a group practice future

Showing again that innovation isn't dead in single-payer (and for that matter socialized) systems, the Brits are serious about creating the environment for pay for performance. In an article called Super-surgery plan signals end for the family doctor, the Times...

PHARMA: Two quickies

The guy who was mentioned in a THCB post a while back about writing a tell-all book about being a slacker Viagra salesman has found that his new employer, Eli Lilly, didn't approve, and fired him. I assume he'll do...

PHARMA/POLICY: The NY Times misses the point on medicinal marijuana

The New York Times has a very dumb article about medical marijuana called Medicinal Marijuana on Trial, which suggests that medical marijuana hasn't been properly proved by clinical trials. Well leaving aside that plenty of drugs have been approved by...

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: Another terrible patient story

Paul Martin has a terrible story to tell of how his health plan let him down badly, and how the health care system is stopping him getting what seems necessary care. I of course only have his word for all...

PHARMA/PHYSICIANS: How to deal with the prostate conundrum

Dame Edna was always making a running gag about her husband Norm's enlarged prostate. But what should one do about it? Contributor Dr Krankheit (who as you might suspect is just playing one on television) has a solution: The results...

PHARMA: Pain Therapeutics update

Wacky trading indeed in Pain Therapeutics stock Thursday. As faithful THCB readers know I've been in this stock for some time. They have two parallel phase 3s on the first of their potentially huge drugs-- Oxytrex, a replacement for Oxycontin....

HEALTH PLANS: KP Gadlfy update and my commentary

The Gadlfy gets some good press in a Bay Area blog called SFist which notes her side of the story and not Kaisers. The story is called David Versus Goliath -- And Goliath's Bigger Brothers, Backed By The Persian Army...

BLOGS: Alter-lanche

Wow, my hit counter is going crazy. If you're coming over from Eric Alterman's blog, welcome & please take a look around. This blog combines health care business and health care policy, and tries to tell the truth about the...

INDUSTRY/TECHNOLOGY: How GE Medical helped boost offshoring to India, with UPDATE

This is a great article from the WSJ (but reprinted in another paper so you can see it) about how outsourcing to India was in part driven by the medical products group of GE. I am not in general an...

PHARMA: Some funnies from the Pharma Marketing list-serv

Over on the pharma-mkting list serv there's been some fun with those slighly misspelt words that make more sense than the original -- apparently this started in the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational. Well the pharma marketing folks got into it...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser/Gadfly update

So the court case was held this morning, and the court issued an injunction telling the Gadfly to take down the pages with the patient information (and I assume the system diagrams too). That's pretty much what I expected, althought...

POLICY: Yet another shoddy article on single payer

The major outlets of the SCLM (so called liberal media) tend to give lots of column inches to conservatives like William Safire, Debra Saunders, and now Tucker Carlson on NPR and you don't see the reciprocal placing of Michael Moore...

POLICY/POLITICS: Arnie, what a screw-up and what a disappointment

It's incredible what a useless governor Arnie has been. Here was a guy from way outside the political establishment who had the chance to really change politics in California, so what has he done? He ran non-stop adverts all through...

BLOGS & BLOGGING: Excellent HIS blog

Somehow I've managed to miss until today the very interesting HIS talk blog, which has lots of nuggets about the health information systems business. It's been going as long as THCB, so I don't know how I managed to avoid...

OFF-TOPIC: More dumbness in dealing with disgruntled ex-"employee"

Of so this one is not about the the Gadfly and Kaiser, or about health care at all. but it is about another Bay Area institution being unnecessarily dragged into the press and the courts. So Barry Bonds was having...

PHARMA: Review of Overdosed America

John Abramson's Overdosed America gets the excellent review I never got around to giving it at THCB over at Health Affairs.

PHARMA/POLICY: Was Plan B Crawford’s ‘Plan B’ for Commissioner?

Ex-FDAer Robert Steeves has this fascinating look at how Lester Crawford made it to the FDA Commissioner's office despite being largely responsible for the FDA's lack of activity and failed response to the COX-2 acopalypse. This is a re-print from...

POLICY: Klepper on Porter

I've been in a healthy dialog with Brian Klepper and Pat Salber from the Center for Practical Health Reform in the last few weeks. While I don't agree with everything in their analysis, we have huge areas of common ground,...

BLOGS: THCB sells out!

Well not exactly, but I have taken a first tippy-toe in the commercial water by putting Google Ads down in the left column. No idea how it'll play out but maybe I'll cover some of my costs. Because of the...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser/Gadfly update, Fri, with early afternoon UPDATE

So today brings a couple of new wrinkles to the KP story. First, following the initial meeting with the Judge after KP looked for an injunction asking the Gadfly take down the site which allegedly holds the 140 patients' data,...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser Gadly update, Thurs

The Gadfly is apparently being interviewed by NBC tonight. I would have thought that KP would try to settle this before the allegation that they knowingly left patient information out on the web for two years was made on television,...

PHYSICIANS/QUALITY: Now it's smoking too many old doctors kills you, by The Industry Veteran

A recent study instead of looking at specialists versus generalists showed that there's a strong correlation that the older physicians get -- and the further away from medical school -- the worse the outcomes for their patients. While you may...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser Gadfly update

For those of you following along at home.... Today Kaiser sought an injunction against the Gadlfy asking her to take down the web site that supposedly contains the confidential information. The Gadfly has just emailed me telling me that the...

POLICY/PHYSICIANS: Smoking too many specialists will kill you

Health Affairs is out with one of its fun articles looking at the physician labor force. Here's the press release which basically explains that on a county level and controlling for a bunch of other confounding variables (like race, income,...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser patient data release spat update

Sigh. Well KP, an organization that (I repeat) I have much respect for, is not taking my advice in the tawdry little business of whether they or the Gadfly released patient data onto the Internet. If you go to the...

BLOGS/QUALITY: More ego surfing--me on DM in Pharma Executive

Just in case you missed it, Pharmaceutical Executive interviewed me about a whole range of stuff. Out of that they chose some allegedly wise words I had about Disease Management and EMRs in a feature in the February issue. Interestingly...

POLICY: The NY TImes tries to make Cutler a star

There's a long and not too revealing article about Harvard health economist David Cutler in the NY Times magazine. It's called the The Quality Cure? and I will try to get to some comments on what's wrong with it later...

BLOGS: Grand Rounds up

Grand Rounds is up over at Orac's blog and it's done in the style of a TV narrative called What to watch this week. My post is part of Boston Legal, which apparently has James Spader and Captain Kirk in...

OFF-TOPIC: THCB's favorite organization 100 today

Not on topic for health care, other than they've given me lots of minor heart attacks down the years, but Chelsea Football Club is 100 years old today. We haven't won the league for 50 years, but we're well on...

HEALTH PLANS: Health Scam for those desperate for cash...and I mean desperate

So there's another version of the fraud that was exposed somewhat last summer, involving recruiting a whole lot of patients for unnecessary surgery. The Blues in particular seem to have been badly hit by this new scam. However, speaking as...

PHARMA: The Industry Veteran on the new career choice for ambitious young pharma execs

Forbes has an article out called The Dark Side of Whistleblowing which discusses the growth of somewhat dubious methods to make cash by insiders at the scene of the crime reporting and documenting government rip-offs by contractors, rather than the...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser's Gadfly hits the big time

Those of you with memories that stretch back to the dog days of summer last year may remember the somewhat curious incident of the Kaiser Permanente Thrive campaign coming up in THCB. If you missed it, here's a brief recap....

POLICY/POLITICS: A despair at the lack of new ideas

A long time THCB friend and contributor is back from the big NMHCC show. He was not impressed at what he heard: Just got back from NMHCC in DC last night. I was shocked - shocked! - at the paucity...

POLICY/POLITICS: Faith-based health care as the solution for the health insurance crisis

New contributor Susan Mucha has some interesting and amusing takes on the views of the Republican voting core on the health insurance question:Excellent thoughts on this topic. I share your frustration on shopping for health insurance--my "association plan" is $6500...

BLOGGING: Minor IE screwup

There was a minor screw-up in the template today and that meant that Internet Explorer and Safari users couldn't get to the site for a while. My apologies. It's now been fixed, but for your techies out there you'll be...

QUALITY/TECH: ePrescribing as part of P4P for Wellpoint

In more from the HIT conference, Leo Barbaro the network management services VP for Wellpoint Northeast (Blue Cross NH, Connecticut, Maine) gave a talk in which he jammed together an ePrescribing talk with his P4P talk and gave some ideas...

TECHNOLOGY: HIT conference....Interoperability

So I spent part of yesterday at the HIT meeting west in San Francisco. The most amusing session has Molly Coye pretending that she's the governor, and apart from the wisecracks about steroids and occasionally forgetting that she's supposed to...

BLOGS and BLOGGING: Is Joe interesting

I met a leading luminary from America's physician world yesterday, and he questioned whether (at least one of) the "Interesting health care people" list I have in my right hand blog roll were really interesting. So should I change it...

TECHNOLOGY: And you thought drugs got on the market too quickly and easily?

I'll be at the HIT West conference later today hopefully with a little live blogging if things go well. But meanwhile two articles over the weekend persuaded me that plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose in the wacky...

POLICY: Medicaid muddles on

Today's story about California hospitals suing Medi-cal comes on the heels of a week of meetings between state governors and the Bush administration about Medicaid. Medicaid has long been a dog's breakfast of American health policy with all types of...

PBMs: Express Scripts net surges

From the "why does this keep happening?" file, it looks like the PBM sector is continuing to remain very profitable. Today it's the turn of Express Scripts to announce that its earnings were up 13 percent. It also revised up...

TECHNOLOGY: Nine Tech Trends and one big barrier

I am wrestling with a much longer piece on the EMR than I was hoping it would be, but silly me I've got myself mired in CHINs, ePrescribing and RHIO. And given that I'm going to see Duran Duran tonight...

PHARMA: DTC WARS, Epsiode IV (with more apologies to George Lucas)

Apologies in advance, THCB goes back into movie mode once again to discuss the somewhat arcane subject of DTC Rx marketing..... A long time ago in a universe far, far away a bright young survey researcher enrolled with some fellow...