Merrill Goozner

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.

Posts by Merrill Goozner

MedCity Influencers

Obama’s nomination of a doctor supports public health trend at World Bank

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 […]

MedCity Influencers

ACA will survive even if the individual mandate falls

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 […]

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MedCity Influencers

Raising the Medicare age is cost shifting, not saving

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 […]

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Hospitals

Cancer’s catch-22: Effective targeted cancer therapy doesn’t come cheap

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. […]

MedCity Influencers

Ethics, disclosure and the FDA: Yaz, Yazmin just the beginning

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 […]

MedCity Influencers

Will Mitt Romney fight healthcare fraud?

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 […]

MedCity Influencers

Multiple myeloma death shows the problem of ‘patient advocacy’

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 […]

Hospitals

It’s not all bad news for Avastin, thanks to NCCN guideline committee

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 […]

Hospitals

Does America really need more doctors?

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 […]