Apparently the Administration is going to follow up on their threat to go after Michael Moore for his Sicko stunt of taking patients to Cuba.. This should give Sicko, which did OK for a documentary but not exactly Farenheight 911 numbers, a bit of a life at the box office.

But can the Bush Administration really be that stupid? (This is a rhetorical question, BTW)

Gary Schwitzer is Publisher
of HealthNewsReview.org. He’s a journalism professor at the
University of Minnesota, a member of the Association of Health Care
Journalists and, formerly, a 15-year television medical news reporter.

There’s probably never been as much high-quality health care journalism in the U.S. as there is
today, but, at the same time, there’s probably never been as much
schlock.  We invite THCB readers to visit our
site – HealthNewsReview.org – a groundbreaking effort to provide
daily checkups of U.S health news coverage.   

A team of more than two dozen
reviewers from across the U.S. – organized and funded by the Foundation
for Informed Medical Decision Making – regularly reviews health care news
stories reported by about 60 major news organizations.  The reviewers
have different backgrounds – journalism, public health, medicine,
health services research – but they apply the same 10 standardized
criteria in their reviews of stories.  (See “How We Rate Stories”) 

After a little more than a
year of operation, and after reviewing 400 stories, our database allows
us to hold up a pretty clear mirror to news decision-makers about their
performance. 

Continue reading…

Maggie Mahar  writes on healthcare, economics and public policy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Barrons, Institutional Investor and may other publications. A regular contributor for THCB, her most recent book is "Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much." She was recently named a fellow at The Century Foundation.

Only in America do physicians
who evaluate new drugs need bodyguards.

You may have read about the
brouhaha surrounding Provenge, a vaccine designed to extend the lives
of men suffering from late-stage prostate cancer. In March, a Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel voted 13 to 4 to recommend
approval. The next day, shares of Dendreon, the drug’s sponsor, doubled.

But shareholders did not celebrate
for long. Two of the dissenting votes were cast by the panel’s two
prostate cancer specialists: Sloan-Kettering’s Howard Scher and the
University of Michigan’s Maha Hussain. And they did not just vote
“no”—following the hearing, both wrote to the FDA arguing that
Dendreon offered no solid evidence that Provenge works.

The FDA listened. And in May
it told the company it wouldn’t approve the drug until it had   more
data. That is when the two oncologists began receiving threatening e-mails,
phone calls, and letters. Many were anonymous.

Continue reading…