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.
The deficit reduction “super committee” charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget reductions over the next decade shouldn’t let this one pass. The Congressional Budget Office today estimated that ending drug industry “pay for delay” deals with generic manufacturers will save the federal government over $5 billion over the next decade. The “Preserve […]
The question arises in the wake of yesterday’s news that the government and GlaxoSmithKline settled a string of lawsuits charging the company with illegal promotion of prescription drugs for unapproved uses. The $3 billion settlement represented just a small fraction of the sales to patients for whom the off-label prescriptions either caused harm or did […]
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Whither CMS? That’s the issue raised by Brian Klepper and David Kibbe in their post on the Health Affairs website this morning. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services faces a November deadline for answering a complaint by six Georgia physicians that claims the American Medical Association’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) violates the […]
Last Friday at 3 p.m., the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality held a telephone briefing to inform the press and public about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation against routine screening of prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels in middle-aged men. The “D” recommendation, now open for public comment, said the harms from false […]
The little-known American Medical Association committee that recommends physician pay scales to Medicare’s fee-for-service program today asked the agency to reimburse physicians for coordinating care for their chronically-ill patients. In a letter to administrator Donald Berwick, the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (better known as the RUC) recommended the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services […]
Don’t blame us, blame the Office of Management and Budget, officials at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Senators Charles Grassley (R-Ia.) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) last week. The senators had inquired why CMS missed the deadline for publishing a rule outlining how drug companies should comply with the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, […]
The press releases flew from various House committees yesterday afternoon (which double as Republican Party campaign offices). The charge: rising health care premiums are due to “Obamacare.” The latest Kaiser Family Foundation employer survey of health care insurance costs, which was reported on the front page of all this morning’s newspapers, showed premiums rose 9 […]
There’s a lot to like in the health care provisions of the Obama administration deficit reduction plan, which reduces Medicare and Medicaid costs by $320 billion over the next decade (this on top of the half trillion in cuts included in health care reform). Half the money in Medicare “cuts” ($135 billion) would come from […]
Here’s one cheer for the “Million Hearts” initiative launched yesterday by Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Donald Berwick, chief of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. By establishing a goal of reducing heart attacks and strokes by 10 percent a year over the next five years, they’ve […]
A federal study of a new stent designed to prevent repeat strokes was stopped early because 2 1/2 times (14.7%) more people either died or had a repeat stroke after receiving the stent than those who received drugs and counseling (5.8%). The $20 million study, stopped after just 451 stroke victims had been enrolled because […]
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Pfizer last week won Food and Drug Administration “accelerated approval” for Xalkori (crizotinib) for a rare form of metastatic lung cancer that strikes about 3 percent of people — almost always non-smokers — who come down with the disease. That’s about 10,000 patients per year in the U.S., and perhaps a similar number abroad. Multiply […]
In a rare bit of good news for the Obama administration and budget policymakers, health care costs increased last year at their slowest pace since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid 1960s. The new analysis, released on July 25 by officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that administers the […]
Another day, another study showing that invasive cardiologists overuse angioplasty and insert unneeded stents in patients without acute symptoms of coronary artery disease. The latest study, which appeared in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, deemed 15 percent of the 600,000 angioplasties done every year are either inappropriate or their necessity is uncertain. Since […]
The Food and Drug Administration’s Prescription Drug User Fee Act is up for re-authorization next year, and so is the consumer and drug industry face-off over the contentious issue of comparative effectiveness research (CER). Consumers, patients and some physicians are demanding that CER be required of all new drugs coming to market when there are […]
The health care cost debate takes place on two stages using two languages, one scientific, the other economic. The net result is a failure to communicate. The scientific texts emanated over the weekend from the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. Ongoing clinical trials showed that science has come up with new drugs […]