10 of the Worst Big Pharma Company Rip-Offs — and Their Plan to Keep the Gravy Train Rolling
Martin Shkreli isn't the only one putting high prices on life saving drugs.
When did you become aware of the obscene prices the pharmaceutical industry is charging for drugs? For many it was when a smirking Martin Shkreli, founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, testified on the Hill in February about his price hike of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750, after which he called lawmakers “imbeciles” in a tweeted goodbye.
Surprise! You're covered for the hospital, not the doctors
by David Lazarus - LA Times
fter Dave Connors' teenage son broke his leg, he was rushed to an Orange County hospital that Connors knew was in his insurer's coverage network.
It was only after the bills recently started arriving that he learned the doctors and anesthesiologist in the operating room were out of network, requiring him to pay thousands of dollars more.
"When you're at a hospital that you know is in-network, who would think to ask individual people if they're also in-network?" Connors said. "Especially when your son is being operated on."
This wasn't an isolated example of our patient-unfriendly, for-profit healthcare system.
Nearly a quarter of Californians who had hospital visits since 2013 were surprised to find that at least some charges at in-network hospitals were at out-of-network rates, according to
a survey last year by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160325-column.html
How to Stop Overprescribing Antibiotics
By CRAIG R. FOX , JEFFREY A. LINDER and JASON N. DOCTOR
ANTIBIOTICS are an indispensable weapon in every physician’s arsenal, but when prescribed unnecessarily for nonbacterial infections like the common cold, as they too often are, they provide no benefit and create problems. They wipe out healthy bacteria and can cause side effects like yeast infections and allergic reactions. Worse still, they contribute to the rise of “superbugs” that resist antibiotic treatment.
The Global War on Drugs Has Unleashed an International Health Crisis, Says Top Health Panel
Zero-tolerance policies have fueled lethal violence, disease transmission, discrimination and forced displacement.
A premiere public health commission warned Thursday that the global war on drugs and zero tolerance policies are unleashing an international health crisis by fueling “lethal violence, communicable-disease transmission, discrimination, forced displacement, unnecessary physical pain, and the undermining of people's right to health.”
A joint initiative of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Lancet, the commission released a report calling for a global transformation of drug policy—towards decriminalization and harm reduction.
Obamacare is on back burner in the race for the White House
by Albert Hunt - Bloomberg View
No issue has aroused more partisan passion over the past six years than the
Affordable Care Act. Yet, the law is playing only a secondary role in during the election.
Sure, Republican presidential candidates cater to their base by vowing to repeal and replace Obamacare, and on the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont promises to replace it with a government-run universal coverage system.
But it doesn’t dominate the dialogue and isn’t a top priority on either side. Among the most embattled Senate Republican incumbents, the campaign websites of New Hampshire’s
Kelly Ayotte,
Mark Kirk of Illinois or
Ron Johnsonof Wisconsin barely mention the ACA. An exception is
Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
The explanation may be that for all its controversy and imperfections, the sweeping law has taken hold. “This is in the fabric of the nation,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said.
To be sure, the presidential election outcome will be a determinant of whether Obamacare is reshaped, bolstered or downsized.
US Doctor Group Demands Price Controls for Out-of-Control Drug Industry
American College of Physicians publishes policy paper on getting skyrocketing drug prices under control
The American College of Physicians (ACP), a group of 143,000 internal medicine doctors, on Tuesday published a position paper calling on the government to do more to regulate the skyrocketing costs of pharmaceutical drugs.
The article, written by the ACP's Health and Public Policy Committee and published in the
Annals of Internal Medicine, notes that the U.S. is one of the only economically advanced countries in the world that does not have any government regulation of drug prices.
"In the United States we pay comparatively much more for prescription drugs than other countries, an increasing concern for all Americans,"
said ACP president Dr. Wayne J. Riley. "The impact of these rising costs can be very detrimental to patients, causing them to forgo filling important prescriptions or not taking drugs on the schedule that they are prescribed."
The ACP made seven recommendations to help slow down and maintain the price of medicine, including:
• Transparency in the pricing, cost, and comparative value of all pharmaceutical products;
• Allowing price negotiation by Medicare and other publicly-funded health programs, consideration of reimporting drugs manufactured in the U.S., and increasing competition for sole-source drugs;
• Ensuring that patient cost-sharing is not set at a level that imposes a "substantial economic barrier" to patients.
As
NPR reports, the ACP also called for "drugmakers to disclose the actual research and production costs of developing and manufacturing each drug, and to disclose the prices paid for drugs—including discounts and rebates—that take advantage of basic research funded by the government, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs."
