I said a while back that I wouldn’t do just tell you to go read other stuff, but there’s a deluge that you just must pay attention to–all out in the last 24 hours.
1) Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a confirming study that those seniors at the bottom with high drug spending will be better off from the drug-benefit in the MMA, but that many more in the middle will not be.
2) Arnie Milstein shows why he believes that the "shark" of rising health care costs will be contained by the efficiencies brought to the system by the "engineers".
3) The continued aftershocks of the Vioxx hearings continue very very loudly. JAMA is out with a whole raft of articles mostly suggesting that major FDA reform is needed, and that drug company studies have routinely withheld data from the public and by inference JAMA and its fellow journals. While a lawyer for Bayer fires back very aggressively, Astra-Zeneca CEO McKillop seems to be breaking with PhRMA orthodoxy and admitting that there’s a real problem–possibly in an attempt to save Crestor before it falls victim to the Vioxx syndrome.
Given that my work putting together the FierceHealthcare newsletter (go sign up!) was, shall we say, made somewhat challenging by this plethora of activity, I suggest that you go take in some of these articles, and I’ll be back with more comment later in the day/week.
Thank God we get to take the end of the week off!
Meanwhile one of my true fans has nominated THCB for the worst medical blog over at Echojournal!
