The Health Care Blog

TECHNOLOGY: It's IBM Week!

It's some kind of a record. IBM has been a top story three times this week, culminating in the news yesterday that it's going to be reinventing healthcare IT with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UMPC). Some of the...

HEALTH PLANS: I agree wth the NY Times in general, but perhaps someone should tell Wellpoint that they are doing badly

So yesterday the NY Times has an article suggesting that the good times are over for health insurers. In the last five years they've seen huge growth and profits while they've retreated from active care management and trying to push...

PHARMA: DTC advertising works; not exactly a revelation!

So I spent far too much of my life trying to figure out the exact impact that DTC drug ads would have on the exact consumer sub-demographic so that marketing could be refined, and consumer segments sliced and diced. Turns...

HEALTH PLANS: The Blues says that AHPs would Raise Costs, Won’t Reduce Uninsured

Here's some totally self-serving propaganda from the Blues about how terrible AHPs are and how Federal AHPs would raise costs, create more uninsurance and (although they don't mention it) be a likely venue of huge amounts of fraud -- as...

POLICY: Now they are saying that there are fewer uninsured?

As if this one couldn't be seen coming a mile off. When you have nothing to say about an issue, change the numbers. In the 1980s the Thatcher government in Britain reduced the number of unemployed at a stroke by...

PHARMA/PHYSICIANS: Smoking Gun on the Chemotherapy Drug Concession? by Greg Pawelski

Neil Love, M.D. reports from a survey of breast cancer oncologists based in academic medical centers and community based, private practice oncologists. The academic center-based oncologists do not derive personal profit from the administration of infusion chemotherapy, while the community-based...

POLICY: Medicare to start real rationing

Just briefly today.... It looks like Medicare is just starting down a path that it inevitably will have to take. Deciding when and how to say no. The NY Times has an article about the very start of this trend....

PHARMA: Overstepping the line. Who could have known?

It's a tough life these days in the pharma business. Profits are down, sales force lay-offs are coming up, and the industry is restricted from using its favorite techniques to get doctors to write more scripts, while its reputation is...

PHARMA: Pay me more money or I'm moving my operations off-planet!

So poor impoverished Sir Tom McKillop, CEO of Astra-Zeneca, a man knighted for his services to British industry, is upset. Now just because his main achievement in life is to replace one purple pill with another that is more or...

PHARMA/POLICY: Another Canadian import to cause trouble?

As you know I (along with a couple of other medical bloggers) have long been opposed to the War on drugs and the ridiculous ban on marijuana. Marijuana has obvious medical uses, particularly as an anti-nausea and anti-neuralgia agent. Many...

POLICY: Unrealistic, unfair mercatilism in health care.

I like Don Johnson's blog Businessword but sadly when you really push him, as I've done in his comments over the last couple of years, he either won't answer or his answers reveal a political philosophy that is downright mean....

POLICY: Ezra Klein on Health Care in France

Ezra Klein is a nauseatingly over-achieving student at UCLA who, at an age when I was trying to pick sufficient 10p pieces out of the gutter to buy myself a half of ale at the college bar (and usually end...

Policy: A Break in the Florida HIV case By John Pluenneke

It sounded a lot like one of those stories from Florida we keep hearing about. A mystery like the chads. Or the anthrax case, which started not far away in Boca Raton. Two months ago a worker at the Palm...

PHARMA: Why is Crawford's FDA nomination stalled?

Good salacious stuff for a Friday. Apparently the scuttlebut inside the FDA is that reason that the FDA acting commissioner Crawford's nomination is being held up is because he's favoring an FDA staffer. What this means, according to a much...

HOSPITALS: Hospitals on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Sorry, so the title is another bad attempt to be imitate an old Spanish movie but the problem is real enough. If the formula is, increase the number of jobs available without insurance, add more people moving into a county...

POLICY: Krugman on the international health care context

Paul Krugman has a great column out about the international health care context, called The Medical Money Pit. There's nothing new or original that THCB readers or Health Affairs readers won't already know. We spend more and basically get less,...

PBM: Caremark apparently about to face fraud charges?

Writing in The Street Melissa David says that a 6 year-long investigation of Caremark receiving overpayments for Texas Medicaid is about to result in indictments. Caremark stock reacted poorly to the rumors. Of course indictments and charges are nothing new...

PHARMA: Patients are stil "complieant"

Patients don't take their pills properly. Some estimates are that 30% of written scripts are never filled. Now there's a new Harris study out showing that 33% of patients are actively non-compliant. Of course if all these patients took all...

POLICY: Super Size This! By John Pluenneke

As if the US fast food industry didn’t have enough worries with new labeling rules under discussion at the FDA and the campaign for healthy school foods being led in California by the Governator, there is more bad news on...

INDUSTRY/POLICY: Diabetes primer

Sorry -- was crazy busy yesterday, so light posting today. Meanwhile if you want to see something interesting, on the Pfizer-sponsored site Health Politics, Dr Mike Magee has a primer on Diabetes in the US.

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: It will stagger you to find out that health care competition may not result in better quality!

Now I want you all to sit down comfortably and drink a glass of water before you read this article. Says here (in a story cribbed from the academic journal Medical Care) that Health care competition may not result in...

HEALTH PLANS: Are there any winners from the high deductible games?

The LA Times had an article this weekend about how patients were leaving HMOs to go PPOs which were essentially high deductible plans. The article claims that the new trend is leaving HMOs in an Unstable Condition: as Members Bolt...

HEALTH PLANS/PHYSICIANS: More patient confidentiality probs at SF Bay area institutions, with UPDATE

So not long after the mess with Kaiser and the Gadfly appears to be heading to a court solution, there are two more weird breaches of patient confidentiality both demonstrating that it's not technology but the physical security of data...

PHARMA: Squaring the circle on Pfizer's job cuts

Over at the Pharma Marketing Blog and on the Pharma Marketing list-serv John Mack is confused about Pfizer's real intentions. Is Pfizer eliminating up to 11,000 sales rep jobs or isn't it? A WSJ article states: "In another cost-cutting plan,...

PHARMA: FDA orders Pfizer to withdraw Bextra

This just in at the Health Care Blog's New York Desk ... The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ordered Pfizer to withdraw Bextra from the market and urged "the possible strongest warning" for it's fellow Cox-2 inhibitor Celebrex. See...

POLICY/POLITICS: Wanna be physician of the year? Pay Bush $1,500

In a hard hitting investigation ABC news is shocked, shocked(!) to find out that such an honorable profession as that of physicians is not above creating lots of phony awards so that everyone can win one. The joke is that...

BLOGS: Orac hosts Tangled Bank

Over at his Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows") blog that usually focuses on public health, Orac is hosting The Tangled Bank XXV, which is kind of a Grand Round for scientists. While frankly I don't care too much for basic...

POLICY/PHYSICIANS: Beauty Contest

Modern Physician is running a poll where you can go and vote for the best looking, err...most powerful physician executive in American health care. It's actually quite a tricky call. For example is Tom Frist from HCA the most powerful...

POLICY: Uninsured number will rise, but maybe not enough

In an article in Health Affairs today called It's The Premiums, Stupid Gilmer and Kronick project the numbers of the uninsured through 2013. Kronick, BTW was a co-author with Alain Enthoven of some of his market-based consumer choice articles, though...

PHARMA: Where are the orphan cancer drugs? by The Industry Veteran

Greg Pawelski's recent posting here about whether cancer care could improve has drawn several responses, many of which I'm trying to redirect back into the comments section. One, however, that deserves its own posting is from our old friend The...

POLICY: The high cost of health care

I'm giving a talk this morning about consumer health care so not much time for a long post. Kind of ironic that we're entering the brave new world of consumer health care at a time when the price of insurance...

POLICY/POLITICS: Congress acts in health care emergency

Last week a young Florida child sank into a coma. Due to recent cutbacks, he wasn't eligible for the state CHIP program and with no health insurance and precious little money available from her job at Wal-mart, his mother had...