Tag Archives: Healthcare

Interesting story about a pharma company taking an old drug finding a new usage for it at a particular dosage, filing a patent for the treatment at the specified dosage, and potentially blocking treatment of the disorder at a milligram higher dosage. Drug stores will not fill a prescription at a higher dosage if it is for the treatment of the disorder. Locked up both ways. And the cost to the patient went from pennies to ~$20/pill. A Price Jump...

There are good reasons to want to know the cause of an accident, a fire, – or even a crime; finding out the cause of – the reason for – something undesirable happening could help prevent a recurrence.The media seem to think that we, the public, feel that assigning blame is at least as important as determining the cause. Or, perhaps, it is top-down; the media want us to think it is at least as important to find someone to blame as it is to find the...

At Angry Bear, we have one person and his wife using a KFF Medicare Advantage plan. He reports good to excellent care being the result of the KFF plan. Potentially there still can be cost issue even with KFF plans. This commentary by KFF Health News is about Medicare Advantage plans in general. Read on. I have made some comments in the author’s text. Feds Rein in Predictive Software That Limits Care for Medicare Advantage Patients, MedPage Today,...

Men and Older Americans Eat the Most Beef, businessinsider.com, Catherine Boudreau Just 12% of Americans are eating half of the nation’s beef — the ‘Hummer of animal proteins.’ A study found twelve percent of Americans are eating half of all the beef consumed in the US in a day. Fifty- to sixty-five-year-old men are most likely to eat beef. Some benefits could be had for the planet if some people ditched beef for another protein....

Medicare Advantage Overbilling Taxpayers by $140 Billion a Year, This is Enough to Wipe Out Medicare Premiums, Informed Comment, Juan Cole and Jake Johnson. AB‘s Joel sent me an Informed Comment article. I read the article and knew there was more to the issue than just overcharging the government by upcoding Medicare Advantage plan members. Merrill Goozner writes GoozNews and got the jump on this topic before me in March of this year. Catching up...

I have been thinking about buprenorphine, naltrexone and the stimulants cocaine and methamphetamine. An issue which came to my mind recently and which I think it worth discussing is that cocaine is often cut and replaced with fentanyl to hide the over-dilution. This is sometimes done sloppily leading to fentanyl overdoses of people who did not know they were consuming opiates. This is another reason to provide naltrexone to all who request...

This is the latest in a series of posts about drug assisted therapy (DAT) of opioid use disorder (OUD). I will repeat things which I wrote here and here. The bottom line, so far, is that there is strong evidence that drug assisted therapy ov OUD is effective and many extremely establishment experts complain that it is not more universally available. I think this is one issue which should be a political winner for Joe Biden. I read that...

I saw an article online yesterday that claimed that over 1% of Americans are using semaglutides for weight loss. Since these drugs suppress appetite, the article was about the possible impact on food retail. Since global warming promises to destroy a lot of arable land on the planet, as well as ocean fisheries, reducing food consumption by overweight people strikes me as an unalloyed good. Since obesity is a risk factor for cancer, heart disease,...

A follow up to Joel Eissenberg’s commentary on mRNA and how it came to be at BioNTech. This seemed interesting enough to add another post on mRNA discovery. Some more detail . . . Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to scientists who laid foundation for messenger RNA vaccines (msn.com), Carolyn Y. Johnson The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to two scientists whose research laid the groundwork for messenger RNA vaccines that transformed...

LARC (Long Activer Reversible Contraceptives) are highly effective. It seems to me past time for the US Federal Government to pay for contraceptives (all types not just the device of pharmaceutical but also cost of care from the prescribing physician if required) for everyone who wants them (including Elon Musk if he changes his mind about reproducing as much as possible — no means test). I think that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi should make a big...