Tag Archives: Healthcare

It is doubtful Trump reads much beyond his own signature on Executive Orders and Twitter commentary. Someone is attempting to align him with current thinking creating a persona of his being a thoughtful and reasoning president as opposed to . . . ? In “Again, Healthcare Cost Drivers Pharma, Doctors, and Hospitals ,” I had posted stats from a 2016 JAMA paper covering the period from 1996 to 2013. Healthcare costs had increased $1 trillion of which 50%...

Via Naked Capitalism: Place based economic conditions and the geography of the opioid overdose crisis By Shannon Monnat, Associate Professor, Syracuse University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Over 400,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since 2000. However, there is widespread geographic variation in fatal opioid overdose rates, and the contributions of prescription opioids, heroin, and...

Kevin Drum wrote a typically brilliant post on absurdly high estimates of the growth of the number of health care administrators. I was very interested in one little passage. My comment. Dear Kevin You used to work for a tech company and IIRC in public relations. Now your day job is as a blogger-journalist. Don’t quit your day job. you wrote “Once you take into account the growth in health care generally, the share devoted to administration has gone up...

“Opioid Overdose Now Provides 1 in 6 Donor Hearts,” Ashley Lyles, MedPage Today Overdose-death donors have accounted for a rapidly growing proportion of cardiac allografts, with a 14-fold increase from about 1% in 2000 to now 16.9%, “consistent with the rising opioid epidemic,” reported Nader Moazami, MD, of New York University Langone Health in New York City, and colleagues in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Earlier findings: A total of 1,710 of 15,904...

Robert Kocher and Donald M. Berwick “While Considering Medicare For All: Policies For Making Health Care In The United States Better,” Health Affairs Dr. Donald Berwick is the former Director of Medicare and Medicaid who talked about waste in Medicare and Doctors knowing such waste exists. “It is unlikely that the United States will move quickly to a full publicly financed health insurance when Congress next considers health policy after the 2020...

I’m getting my medical news from the front page of The Washington Post where Christopher Rowland discusses the possiblity that embrel, an anti arthritis drug, reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia. The issue is clearly incredibly important. The article raises interesting ethical, economic, statistical, and biological questions. Better to click the link, but I will attempt a quick summary. There is evidence from anonymized insurance claims records...

I have access to too many articles on a daily basis to the point of where I can not read them all much less write on each topic. This particular one emanates from SWI or Swiss Info High Pharma Margins Squeeze Health Systems by Jessica Davis Plüss. The topic? Cancer drug pricing is rising rapidly and margins are exceeding 80% of price according to Swiss Public Television known as RTS. I find it interesting the Swiss are discussing what to do with cancer...

Married male with children, who was asked to write on three different subjects concerning women’s healthcare by the ConsumerSafety.Org . Although I have worked in the healthcare product industry, I am not a doctor. All three of the healthcare issues I discuss scream for solutions as to what has been done, what should have been done, and how they impact women. I have no doubt if these problems impacted men as much as they do women, a Congress made up...

Just this morning I read this article by The Guardian; Doctor Who Was Paid by Purdue to Push Opioids to Testify Against Drugmaker “In a newly released statement to an Ohio court hearing a combined lawsuit of more than 1,600 cases, Doctor Portenoy accuses drugmakers of underplaying the dangers of opioids and of pushing them on patients who did not need them. The doctor said the industry overstated the benefits of narcotics painkillers and ‘understated the...

In writing about the increase in Opioid abuse since 1980 and looking around for additional information for Robert Waldmann, I ran across this information as developed by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee. The committee is majority led by Republicans with Democrats being a part. The committee had added additional yearly data pre-1980, when the Jick and Porter letter had been written to the NEJM on the rarity of addiction from the use of Opioids, to...