Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about the healthcare industry.
Ferraro’s fight against drug costs. During Geraldine Ferraro’s battle with cancer was one theme: high drug costs.
When she returned to Today in 2007, already having beaten the odds by surviving and thriving for years, Ferraro’s gratitude for the medicines that were extending her life were unabated. But she was starting to worry about their cost. One of the drugs she was taking was costing $1,000 per injection at that time.
“It just is a very, very expensive thing to do, very expensive thing to do, and that’s the one thing that bothers me,” she told Today. “Having to come in twice a week, that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that what’s available to me is not available to every person who has cancer in this country and it should be. It should be.”
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Matthew Herper points out that one of the drugs Ferraro took, thalidomide, jumped from a few hundred dollars per tratment to $2,500 a month by 2007. A new, improved version of the drug went to $6,200 a month.
Geraldine Ferraro praised the researchers who developed the medicines that extended her life, and at the same time worried about the costs of those drugs. There aren’t clear answers for how to solve that paradox, but just starting to think about it a little more deeply would be a wonderful way to honor a remarkable woman.
Healthcare Innovation: The Section. The Wall Street Journal published an Innovations in Health Care section this weekend that covers everything from remodeled ICUs to mobile medical devices. The section’s over-arching message: Sometimes innovation means getting back to the basics.
Goodbye Google Health? A Wall Street Journal story suggests Google Health could get less support under a new Google CEO. So “if you’re depending on Google Health for your CCR / CCD or MU strategy you should keep an eye out on this type of news.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
‘Chinese Medicine’ hits the academic journals. BioMed Central’s Chinese Medicine journal promotes studies of acupuncture, energy research and – as Steven Salzberg puts it – “other nonsense.”
“I support BMC and I’m on the Editorial Boards for three of their journals (BMC Biology, BMC Genomics and BMC Bioinformatics),” Salzberg writes. “But their corporate leaders seem to care more about expanding their stable than about maintaining the integrity of science.“
