Amid a growing crisis in financing treatments for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in the developing world, an arm of the World Health Organization will meet in Geneva later this month to consider alternative ways of producing lower-cost drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tools to fight the those diseases in poor countries.A background report issued last month [...]

Over the angry protests ofconsumer groups, Congress is moving rapidly ’ and in bipartisan fashion ’ to give drug and medical device companies an easier path to Food and Drug Administration approval for some products in exchange for sharply higher user fees to fund the agency.The five-year user fee reauthorization bill, which includes new fees [...]

What’s in a name? Everything, it would appear, when it comes to describing Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, which the Republican-controlled House of Representatives backed in its budget resolution late last month. The plan would subsidize seniors’ purchase of private insurance plans instead of enrolling in traditional government-financed Medicare, although that would be [...]

Health care spending over the last two years has slowed to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. The conventional wisdom is that it reflected the recession-related reductionsin demand by people who lost jobs and their health care coverage.That could not have affected Medicare’s nearly 50 million beneficiaries, most of whom are retired. Yet Medicare spending [...]

When you take money from everyone, is it no longer a conflict of interest?I only raise the question after reading the latest in the ongoing dust-up over implanted defibrillators, where the latest company on the hot seat for selling flawed devices (St. Jude Medical) has accused the scientist who brought the situation to light–Dr. Robert [...]

Justice Stephen Breyer seemed unsure of his facts during the recent Affordable Care Act hearings.During oral arguments on the constitutionality of health care reform, he suggested that the law’s Medicaid expansion, which will offer government coverage to about 15 million low-wage workers and their families, was smaller than previous expansions — notably, the change of [...]

President Obama’s surprise nomination of Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim to run the World Bank ratifies the quiet but noticeable shift in global development priorities. Where the world’s biggest lender to developing countries once focused almost exclusively on infrastructure projects and economic development, it now sees human development as crucial to improving the economic performance [...]

Opponents of health care reform, whose case will be heard next week by the Supreme Court, base their complaint against the Obama administration’s signature domestic achievement on the claim that its individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional.Challengers, including state attorneys general and governors in a majority of states, say it represents an unwarranted [...]

Professors Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin of the Center for Medicine and the Media at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice are raising alarms about a recent Food and Drug Administration decision to approve a new dosage for the best-selling Alzheimer’s drug Aricept (donepezil). The decision “breached the FDA’s own regulatory standard” [...]

Mitt “Two Cadillacs” Romney in his Detroit speech on Friday said he’d like to raise the age on Medicare eligibility to 67 to save the taxpayers money. A Congressional Budget Office report released last month found raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65 would reduce Medicare spending by $148 billion over the next [...]