Tag Archives: Healthcare

It has been a while since Angry Bear has featured Annie Asks You . . . Just been busy and I have been delinquent in doing so. This topic has been a long time in coming. I am confident it will be one which pushes America in the right direction. “AnnieAsksYou . . . “ [embedded content] While the Republicans continue to scramble and dig more deeply into the hole created since the radical Supreme Court majority decimated reproductive freedom,...

by Antonio Ciaccia 46brooklyn Research A January Unlike Any Other In case you didn’t notice from our last report on new year price changes, at the end of December 2023, many insulin vials and pens took significant (i.e., 75%+) list price decreases. Given much of the early 2024 attention on brand drug list price increases, it bears repeating that insulins in 2024 are largely a quarter of the price they were in 2023. This cratering of prices...

New drugs go through clinical trials before they can be marketed. Phase I trials are for safety. Phase II/III trials are for efficacy. If a drug fails these trials, it can’t be sold.One challenge to drug testing is trial enrollment. Ideally, the subjects should be demographically representative. The problem is that there can be significant variation among trial participants that is not reflected in sex, age or ethnicity.Drugs have a half-life in the...

by Dean Baker CEPR Not much of a surprise here the 11 Washington Post’s Charts need some explaining to correct the misinterpretation of them by WaPo. The issue here is the amount of bad or false information floating around in the news media today. People tend to believe what they initially read and go no further. When people like Prof. Dean come along and correct the inaccuracies it can be misinterpreted as political. People want to believe...

Pretty much a rewrite to provide simpler reading and a better understanding for readers. My rewrite did not make it much shorter. It is taken from a recent 2025 Health Affairs article. The main thrust of this article being commercial Medicare Advantage insurance companies taking advantage of government payments for healthcare to Medicare patients. The other part being CMS doing more to resolve the issues. MA Coding for patients is set the year before...

There will never be enough human kidneys available to transplant all the patients in renal failure who are on dialysis. While there has been considerable interest in xenotransplantation (sourced, in this case, from pigs), the barriers to sustainable transplant have so far proved insurmountable: these include immune rejection and activation of cryptic viruses. Now, thanks to genome editing, those barriers may now be overcome:“The pigs whose organs...

Chances are everyone pays for Preventative Care in the overall cost of a policy. There is no obvious cost sharing. This is ridiculous argument on the part of the anti this and that healthcare insurance companies and those who believe the government goes too far in healthcare and then denies the care. Another Bad Moon Arising with SCOTUS “traditionalism” interpretation of the Constitution. What would they do in 1776? ~~~~~~~~ The rightwing...

AB: I was searching for a clear, brief, and understandable explanation of how the pharma industry works in delivering pharmaceuticals to patients. This article is one of the better ones out there and has a good and reasonable explanation on how the system works with prices, rebates, etc. A quick email to Antonio and I was given permission to use their commentaries. First in a series. It is not terribly long and the words give meaning to the charts....

The DHHS report (Michigan) found age, gender and other factors contributed to differing PFAS blood levels Kyle Davidson @ Michigan Advance Angry Bear: Shortly before we left Michigan for other digs. the pollution of water ways due to PFAS was coming more to light where we lived in Livingston County as well as other parts of Michigan. There was an advisory not to eat the fish out of some lakes. PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a...

To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study reports that deep learning algorithms can distinguish which cancers will, and which won’t, metastasize to the brain based...