Merrill Goozner is an award-winning journalist and author of "The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs" who writes regularly at Gooznews.com.
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 […]
By reducing administrative burden and redesigning workflows around human needs, it creates space for what matters most: connection between clinicians and patients.
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 […]
Would you sell your home’s storm doors to pay for this winter’s heating bills? That’s what Congress did Friday to pay for part of a 10-month “doc fix.” Friday’s payroll tax cut extension bill included $18 billion to maintain Medicare physician salaries at current levels for the rest of this year. Unlike the payroll tax […]
I had dinner over the weekend with a close friend who is a breast cancer survivor (her word) and a former avid participant in the annual marathons sponsored by the Susan B. Komen Foundation. Her status as a former activist was new. “Is this what we were racing for?” she said. She is skeptical by […]
Discover the top AI-powered EAP providers for 2026. Compare platforms like Kyan Health and Spring Health on triage speed, global reach, and clinical quality to transform workforce wellbeing.
It’s too bad former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t want to talk about his state’s health care reform legislation on the campaign trail. If he did, he’d have a pretty good story to tell. The reform plan, which President Obama used as a model for the national reform, lifted the number of insured residents in […]
Julie Grabow, an oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, recently prescribed an exciting new therapy for a 60-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer. Three-and-a-half years into her battle against the disease, the patient had already exhausted three different anti-estrogen therapies, each of which only put a temporary check on the spreading tumors. […]
Much has been made of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision last month to overrule Food and Drug Administration scientists and prohibit the over-the-counter sale of the morning after pill to minors. Many observers blasted the move as a blatant political move by the White House, which didn’t want to antagonize social conservatives […]
Regular readers of this blog know how much importance I attach to the war on waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs (see posts here and here). Anyone who cares deeply about providing health care for all our citizens needs to make this a high priority, since taxpayers won’t long support those […]
Enterprise EHR boosts scalability, interoperability, and governance for large healthcare systems.
I recently received word that Alessandro Liberati, the Head of the Italian Cochrane Network, passed away from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. The Cochrane network is a worldwide collaboration committed to conducting comparative analyses of medical interventions. In a recent letter to The Lancet, Liberati noted his own experience in searching the […]
The U.S. attorney in Minneapolis settled a kickback case with device maker Medtronic yesterday, with the company agreeing to pay $23.5 million without admitting it paid doctors $1,000 to $2,000 for choosing its brand of defibrillator. What is so galling about this and other cases like it is that the physicians were being asked to […]
Writing in next week’s New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard professor David Blumenthal, former head of Medicare’s health information technology division, forecasts the following scenario should the Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress next year and repeal most of the Affordable Care Act: By 2020, 20% of Americans may be uninsured, […]
They did the right thing. Two clinical trials showed no improvement in mortality among women with metastatic breast cancer. Those trials didn’t even replicate the delay in progression of disease that had been shown in the original trial that led to accelerated approval in 2007. Now comes the firestorm from patient advocacy groups, who will […]
The Obama administration is about to unveil a $1 billion plan to beef up the nation’s health care workforce. The goal, in part, is to increase the number of physicians available to serve the nation’s aging population. If one takes a superficial overview, one can find evidence to back up claims that the U.S. suffers […]