Ecstasy commercial — great parody (at Kevin, M.D)
INTERNATIONAL: Hospitals, clinics rake in cash with unnecessary medical tests
It says so in the paper so it must be true. Where has John Wennberg turned his attention to now? VietNam
POLICY/POLITICS: Solving The American Health Care Crisis
Umang Malhotra has been in touch with me about his new book. There’s a summary article up on the web and details about the whole book. It’s called Solving The American Health Care Crisis.
PBM/PHARMA: The Group Guy
The Group Guy: new blog from a benefits broker who is not too impressed with PBMs or the average knowledge level of his customers about generics.
BOGS: Worldhealthcareblog
The WHCC Europe edition has it’s own blog at Worldhealthcareblog.org. Very detailed recounting of what’s going on at the conference. I did it for them at Washington Dc last year and will be doing so again next month. No one told me that I could have gone to Barcelona too!
POLICY/POLITICS: Up at The Grauniad
My father would rolling in his grave if he wasn’t still alive. I, yup the guy who voted for Thatcher twice, have been given a column on the venerable web site of The Guardian–the paper of the wet liberal lefty chattering classes in the UK. I’m up explaining the Democratic Presidential candidate’s health plans or lack of them.
This past week saw the first debate among the Democratic candidates
for president about what has become the most important domestic issue
in American politics: the country’s failed healthcare system.
To serious students of policy, America’s healthcare is the most obvious
feature of its society and economy that needs correction. However, to
serious students of American politics, reforms to the
healthcare system are the most difficult problems. Case in point: the
Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994 in large part because of
opposition to the Clinton healthcare plan.The problem is that healthcare system reform will necessitate
controlling the system’s huge and growing costs – currently 17% of GDP
in the US against less than 10% in most of Europe. But those reforms
will need to cover the 45 million people who now lack insurance, as
well as reassure middle America that they will keep their coverage, and
not upset upper-income Americans and the senior lobby who are generally
happy with their doctors. And of course then there is the problem of
dealing with a powerful $2,000bn industry which has little interest in
seeing its bumper profits diverted.
POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: More boring pointless mush from the AEI
So the WSJ gives another know-nothing big oil-sponsored hack from AEI another forum to use the same tired defense of the US system in the Elizabeth Edwards case. Oh look! Cancer outcomes are worse here than in Europe therefore their health care systems must be worse. With the unspoken implication that if her husband’s plans get enacted she’d be dead.
Just for a minute ignore all the other issues about costs, the 18,000 people whom the IOM says die each year here earlier than they would in those European countries because they’re uninsured, medical bankruptcies up the wazoo, etc, etc, and feast your eyes instead on this little nugget from a much longer article at the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Contrary to popular belief, the health care here isn’t always the best. Many other industrialized countries provide health care that is just as good and sometimes better. For instance, 30-day acute myocardial infarction case-fatality rates are below 7% in Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland, compared with almost 15% in the United States. Incidence of major amputations among diabetic patients in Finland, Australia, and Canada is less than 10 per 10,000 compared with 56 per 10,000in the United States. And Australia, Canada, England, and New Zealand all have a better 5-year kidney transplantation survival rate than the United States.
There are so many better things to be arguing about.
But if the AEI and the fake free-marketeers want to play that game, why is the American health care system killing people with heart attacks, or chopping the legs off diabetics at more than double the rate of foreigners? Does the AEI really want to go down that path–particularly as there are way more Americans with heart disease and diabetes than with cancer.
CONSUMERS: Interested in doing a book review?
Citiria Publishing is looking for a reviewer for a patient self-help book, "Heart Bypass – The Road Map".
Please contact clive ‘at’ citiria.com. If it’s good I’ll print the review here.
QUALITY: Plantar warts, duct tape and the real cure
David Williams at Health Business Blog pokes some fun at some investigators looking into a cure for plantar warts who used the wrong type of duct tape in trying to figure out if this cure works. (He calls it File this in the “What were they thinking category?”).
However, having had one of those miserable bastards (a wart that generates it’s own dang blood supply) and failed to get rid of it in the conventional way (acid that kills the rest of the skin on the foot but not the plantar wart) I know the answer. It’s this stuff. http://www.amoils.com/warts.html Works exactly as advertised. This is the only medical product I’ve ever endorsed, and no they’re not paying me and don’t know about this posting! (OK, so it’s an “n” of one, but these guys are still in business 4 years later….)
PHARMA: WSJ’s new blog, NCAA and The Industry Veteran‘s handicapping
The WSJ has a new health blog. Should be good to keep tabs on—focusing mostly on the business of health care. No posts from Barbara Martinez as yet (pity!). One of their earliest posts is a comparison of March Madness basketball with Pharmabrackets. The Industry Veteran is amused but not too impressed:
The March Madness tournament in NCAA basketball has made millions of office workers with too much time on their hands look at the world through elimination brackets. I don’t know if this is an improvement over their tendency over the past 20 years to conceive all existence in terms of spreadsheets. What it has done is taken their parlor trick pastime into some unusual substantive areas. The other day the Wall Street Journal published elimination brackets showing how they believe Big Pharma will devolve into a Final Four. It’s amusing, but as with spreadsheets, regression analysis and other idiot-savant endeavors, it shows a thorough detachment from commonsensical reality.
Any consummation of their elimination pairings runs afoul of some major impediments.1. GSK + AZ. No way, Jose. GSK’s biggest product is Advair and AZ is hoping Symbicort will be its second biggest. A combination would have to axe one of the two.2. Sanofi-Aventis + Novartis. Not in this century. S-A is France’s stake in the ground for a presence in Pharma while Daniel Vasella and his director allies at Novartis are devout Swiss nationalists. More likely the US of A and France would merge to form one country.3. Merck + S-P. Makes sense in that Fred Hassan admits S-P needs pipeline and while S-P can bring marketing acumen to Merck, try getting the latter to admit they need that.4. Pfizer + Amgen. Amgen’s stock is down now because of their shenanigans on Aranesp, but as of 12/31 their market cap was just under $80 billion. Pfizer didn’t do so well with its last megabuy when they acquired Pharmacia for around $60B. I think Pfizer’s CEO Kindler and CFO Shedlarz would be out on their asses if they tried this. Besides, Amgen chairman-CEO Kevin Sharer is the new president of Big Pharma’s lobbying group, PhRMA, and he wouldn’t sell his own company while he’s serving as the industry’s figurehead spokesman.
