Julie Gralow, 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.The newly prescribed drug, Novartis’ Afinitor, is one of the recently approved targeted therapies that have ...
Merrill Goozner
Should the elderly with dementia be given anti-psychotic drugs?
The inspector general of HHS recently reported that nearly half of the anti-psychotic drugs fed to the demented elderly in nursing homes are inappropriately prescribed. That’s about one in fourteen nursing home residents.Forget about cost, which is over a quarter billion dollars a year. “Government, taxpayers, nursing home residents as well as their families and caregivers should be outraged and seek solutions,” wrote Daniel R. Levinson, the HHS I.G. wrote ...
Medicare’s high cost end stage renal disease patients
Anyone who thinks America has the best health care system in the world ought to take a look at its miserable record on caring for end stage renal disease patients on dialysis.About one of every five people who go on dialysis dies in the first year here, compared to less than one in seven in Europe and one in sixteen in Japan. Even after adjusting for age, gender, race ...
Reduce variations in cancer care that do not improve outcomes
Here are a few facts to enliven the next public discussion about death panels.An analysis of Medicare claims by researchers at Dartmouth University found that nationwide nearly one in three cancer patients died in hospitals or in intensive care, the most expensive form of end-of-life care and contrary to most patients’ wishes. Nearly half are not ...
How effective will the physician payment national database be?
ProPublica.org did some interesting frontrunning on the physician payment national database that will become operable sometime around 2013 as part of health care reform.In the first of a series of stories that has been picked up by several mainstream media outlets, the New York-based investigative journalism non-profit culled all the physician payments that have been publicly posted by seven drug companies to date. It aggregated the dollars to ...
Diabetes and leg amputations in McAllen, Texas
The Dartmouth Atlas of Health is once again throwing a harsh spotlight on McAllen, Texas.This time the Mexican border town has the highest rate of leg amputations in the nation, a new report released recently showed. McAllen's rate was ten times the rate of Provo, Utah, which had the lowest rate of leg amputations among the Medicare eligible population. The national average was one-third of McAllen's rate.McAllen became ...
Pfizer spending money to train journalists in how to cover cancer
The National Press Foundation is sponsoring a four-day, all expenses paid trip to Washington for 15 reporters to learn how to improve their coverage of cancer issues. Pfizer is funding the seminar.Former University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer writes:
Even if National Press Foundation staff choose the speakers and set the agenda, even if the Pfizer "guy never even showed up" last year, even if one reporter doesn't ...
Watchful waiting pays off for a torn ACL
"Why golf," my friends often ask. They, like too many Americans, assume it is a sport for the country club set, and have a hard time fathoming why someone like me -- liberal, somewhat intellectual, decidedly anti-elitist -- would passionately embrace the game.My answer is always brief and direct. When I was 35, I tore my right knee's anterior cruciate ligament during one of my twice-weekly pick-up basketball games in ...
Why comparative effectiveness won’t matter to Avastin and Lucentis
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services could save a half billion dollars a year by switching its beneficiaries with macular degeneration to Genetench's Avastin instead of Genentech's Lucentis, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. The two drugs are variations of the same molecule.
Many eye doctors across the country have been switching to the less expensive Avastin ($42 a dose compared to $1593 for Lucentis) to save their ...
How Medicaid will be affected by the recession
About half the uninsured who will get health care coverage under reform will get it through Medicaid, the state programs that provide health care for the poor and near-poor. Those programs are now more than 60 percent federally funded.A story in the New York Times reveals that the recession has pushed those programs to the brink of bankruptcy. Unless Blue Dogs in Congress join with their more liberal Democratic ...
