Post Author: Merrill Goozner

Curbing Medicare costs: Are seniors or the government responsible?

Policy
August 23, 2012

Medicare has moved to the center of this year’s presidential campaign for a single overriding reason: shrinking the nation’s long-term government deficit demands dealing with health care costs. No one – left, center or right – disagrees with that analysis.

What they also agree on is that limiting health care’s inexorable growth will require cutting future payments to those who deliver care – the doctors and hospitals, the nursing homes and …

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Will health reform survive the Supreme Court?

Policy
June 21, 2012

The Supreme Court’s imminent decision on the Affordable Care Act will trigger a political firestorm whether they accept the legislation in its entirety, throw out every page of the 906-page bill or do something in between, which is the most likely outcome.

If the high court follows the polls, it probably will rule the requirement that individuals purchase insurance – the mandate – is unconstitutional but leave the rest of “Obamacare” …

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A look behind the growing cost of cancer drugs

Meds
February 7, 2012

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 …

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Should the elderly with dementia be given anti-psychotic drugs?

Meds
September 4, 2011

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 …

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How effective will the physician payment national database be?

Policy
January 21, 2011

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 …

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Diabetes and leg amputations in McAllen, Texas

Conditions
November 23, 2010

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 notorious earlier …

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Pfizer spending money to train journalists in how to cover cancer

Conditions
October 5, 2010

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 recall Pfizer …

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Watchful waiting pays off for a torn ACL

Conditions
August 30, 2010

“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 …

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Why comparative effectiveness won’t matter to Avastin and Lucentis

Meds
July 30, 2010

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 …

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How Medicaid will be affected by the recession

Policy
June 30, 2010

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 …

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