Merrill Goozner – Page 4 – The Health Care Blog

Daschle out at HHS – Sharfstein in at FDA?

Feb 6, 2009• 21

By MERRILL GOOZNER

The early stages of the Obama administration are beginning to
resemble the Clinton years, which I
observed from afar (I was a foreign
correspondent in Tokyo at the time). Take Zoe Baird and substitute Tom
Daschle, who dropped out of the running for Secretary of Health and
Human Services today because of tax and conflict-of-interest problems.
Take gays in the military and substitute putting in charge of the bank
bailout a man (Tim Geithner) who knows all the bankers from his years
at the New York Fed, seems overly solicitous to their needs, and has
his own tax problems.

Once again, a new Democratic president appears to have a semi-automatic weapon semi-permanently aimed at his foot.

Is Medicare backpedalling on evidenced-based medicine?

Jan 27, 2009• 2

By Merrill Goozner

Note: This post first appeared at Gooznews.com

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
carried stories today on Medicare's expansion of the number of
drug-listing compendia that can now be used to justify reimbursement
for the off-label use of anti-cancer drugs. This expansion, which
GoozNews covered last summer (see posts here, here, and here), will sharply increase Medicare spending on anti-cancer drugs of questionable medical value.

It has also provided drug companies with an alternative system for
getting reimbursed that won't require their going to the Food and Drug
Administration to prove that the regimens listed in the compendia
actually benefit patients.

The effects of this new system were understated in the articles. The Times
estimated that the higher spending by Medicare will come on top of the
$2.4 billion the senior citizen health care program spent on cancer
drugs in 2007. But according to this 2006 testimony
by Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services official Herb Kuhn,
Medicare spent about $10 billion on "Part B" drugs in 2005 (these are
drugs administered in physicians' offices, which includes most cancer
drugs), and about half of that went to oncologists.