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PHARMA/HEALTH PLANS: Responding to propaganda with idiot propaganda

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Michael_moore_2Michael Moore dissects U.S. health care. So the first excerpts of "Sicko" have been shown, and the spin from the industry is already quite remarkable.

We can’t control what a major Hollywood entertainer does," said Mohit Ghose, a spokesman for the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. "Our focus remains on a positive agenda of high-quality health care for more Americans."<SNIP>

Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the trade group Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, said industry officials were "freaking out and pulling their hair out" when they first got word of Moore’s documentary. They have since calmed down, Johnson said. "Michael Moore is a political activist with a track record for sensationalism. He has no intention of being fair and balanced," Johnson said.

Because when you think of health insurers the very first thing that comes to mind is them creating a "positive agenda of high quality health care for ‘more’ Americans" and of course when you think of  big Pharma, "fair and balanced" is exactly what popped into your head.

My suggestion is that until they can put together a fact-based rebuttal–we know that Moore plays fast and loose with the facts–both those organizations should shut the hell up. Otherwise the focus may shift to their not-entirely-glorious track records of telling the truth in public.

BLOGS: Book reviews and new sponsor

For those of you who may have missed it because it was posted in a slow week before Labor day—here’s a link to my review of two books

Winners Take All – The 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy and On Track to Quality. Both well worth a read.

Meanwhile, will you welcome please a new sponsor to THCB. Appearing in the “Sponsored Links” category is 1on1Health, a consumer health information site sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. They’re focusing first on Anxiety Disorder, so don’t be surprised when you see the link on the right.

And of course if you want information about reaching the smartest and largest audience in health care blogging, it’s all just an email away.

PHARMA: Rost loses, or wins?

There’s an amazing place in the world called the Chinese War Memorial. It’s in Taiwan, and it recounts the tale of the Chinese Civil war from the nationalists side, ending with the glorious retreat to the Republic of China, while that little revolutionary difficulty is still going on in those other small Chinese provinces over there on the mainland. It may well be the only place where the losers wrote the history books!

I’m not sure whether Peter Rost’s suit against Pfizer/Pharmacia is in quite the same league, but thanks to the power of the blogosphere we have the official version “Suit dismissed, Pfizer wins” in Brandweek and then we have Rost’s version—we lost on a technicality that will be overturned by the same judge and so we won really. (This is from an email he sent out to his list)

We have a GREAT Qui Tam Court decision, which will help us move the Genotropin qui tam case forward. For me personally, it is a complete vindication of the false accusations Pfizer repeatedly made against me in the press. As you may remember, Pfizer had filed a motion to dismiss my complaint and had made four arguments, three of which the Court eloquently rebuked and the fourth is a technicality which will be relatively simple to handle based on additional information.

Apparently the key question is whether there is a patient database somewhere in the bowels of Pfizer that has patient identifiers that identify the specific program. Or not—as I assume Pfizer thinks. And I guess in the next round we’ll find out who’s telling porkies and who’s not.

Meanwhile Rost has a party coming up on his blog this Sunday. I won’t spoil his surprise, but you might get somewhere in guessing what it is if you look at the title this Spot-on column I wrote a while back.

 

POLITICS: McLellan–a man too soon?

The NY Times calls McLellan’s resignation the Departure of a Pragmatist. The basic problem was that his “reign” at FDA will be remembered for the pained look on his face when he was forced to defend the ban on reimportation on 60 Minutes, and the horlicks that was the introduction of Part D. He never looked too happy defending the stupid industry-based bills that the Congress sent him.

What he really wanted to do of course was turn Medicare into a real influential purchaser. There’s going to be a huge political fight about that, but it will happen eventually. And that’s a role for which he’ll be much better suited. Perhaps he’ll come back then?

POLICY/BLOGS: Comments, and debate right here on THCB

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It’s Friday, it’s still the late summer, and people are drifting back to work…few comments on any of the posts. But wait!

On one tiny post here on THCB, debate and comment fever has broken out with over 65 back and forth comments. If you’ve missed it, go look at the debate, largely inspired by Jack Lohman, who’s book on the corrupting influence of money on politics is the basis for quite some ranting—from a Republican who favors single payer no less!

TECH: Data storage–what to do for home office use?

The NY Times tells us that we shouldn’t keep all our data in one stash.

They’re right. I have everything important at least in two places, but it’s still a struggle to manage.

You can buy online back up, but at the moment it’s just not worth it. Apple charges $100 a year for a gig?  That’s a hell of a markup. You can buy a gig of storage for less than a dollar if you buy more than 100Gs in an external hard drive–-which is what you’ll need if you have movies or much music or lots of photos. Moving it over the net is too slow for those big quantities for now (although it’s getting faster). Moving a gig up or down takes several hours (as those of us who share soccer torrents know)  So that’s the issue for storage.

But what about disaster recovery? I came up with a low tech solution but one with other uses. For less than $200 I bought a fireproof, drop-proof safe that is big enough for all my meager valuables and two external hard-drives. My hard drive lives in the safe if I’m not using it.  Yes of course there’s a chance that either I won’t put it in the safe or that the effect of an earthquake would destroy the disk drive, but it’s not a bad option as it’s something I use anyway for my other valuables, such as passports.

But as the price points change, what I’ll probably end up doing is going with one of the services that the NY Times is talking about. Already one company (Fabrik) is down to 50 cents a month for a gig of storage. That’s still way more than my solution—I’m storing around 100 Gigs (5 of which I really need). So I might be persuaded to put 5–10 of it online for $100 a year. Xdrive will soon introduce something similar (5 gigs for $120 a year) But the ideal solution is a someone selling me 100 Gigs of back up for a little more than than I pay for my external hard drive—say $100.

We’ll get there as storage costs fall. And in about 5 years it’ll be another monthly bill we don’t even think about. But for now the price needs to fall a lot before it’s a mass consumer or even small business market.

And then consumers will start putting lots more online…think banking records and medical records. Perhaps a few tech companies are starting to think about that, eh?

TECH: Do you believe in RHIOs?

Friend of THCB Matt Quinn does, if people can just trust each other—apparently they’ve got some trust going in Ohio. Well worth a read, althought the main purpose of a RHIO needs to be a central ASP providing applications for smaller practices; and that has some of the same problems of the back-up storage issue I’m writing about elsewhere on THCB today.

Anyway to figure out what’s going on in Ohio, read Matt’s letter to Hospitals & Health Networks.

POLICY/POLITICS/HEALTH PLANS: Communist alert! (Well not really…)

The Minnesota Blues plan is floating a proposal for universal care. It looks at first glance like a Mass type individual mandate. Not so long ago Ken Melani, now CEO of Highmark, the dominant Western Pennsylvania Blues plan, had a similar idea.

So it appears that little by little the non-profit Blues are coming around to the fact that they have to have some plan in place to survive the coming revolution. This assumes that their future is a choice between being state regulated utilities in a multi-payer universal care system, or being replaced by the government in a single payer system. And there’s little doubt which one they’d rather take.

Of course these Blues have been denied the option of going for-profit, as the various state legislatures are now wise to the scam that enabled an earlier generation of Blues executives to make themselves rich beyond recognition while providing damn little back to the states that had allowed them that tax-free status for decades (see the experience in Maryland, for instance).

Those that have gone over to the dark side are of course adopting all of the tactics you’d expect, while of course the non-profit guys claim that they have to do the same to remain competitive. If they could construct a universal care multi-payer model in which everyone has to play by the rules of the big local state regulated utility, they’d do fine.

And apparently there are enough senior people, in at least Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, who are beginning to think that that’s the choice they’ll end up with in a few years. So they’re starting to float the proposals now.

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