September 10, 2007
This Morning's In-Box . . .
Stories that caught my eye this morning:
Bush Administration Makes Seniors Pay Their Bills, But Not Insurance Companies
Today's New York Times buries another workmanlike gem by Robert Pear, who runs rings around most other reporters simply by following the bureaucracy. A Government Accountability Office study shows that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is failing to audit payments to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage plans, the private insurance component of the Medicare program. The result is tens of millions of dollars going into insurance companies pockets instead into rebates and/or additional services for seniors, which is the only basis for the claim that these plans are superior to traditional fee-for-service medicine. Halfway through the story, Pear does his own burying. Medicare, he reports, is going after 135,000 seniors that the agency forgot to dun for their prescription drug coverage. The acting administrator, Karry Weems, tells the paper: “I am intently focused on this matter and will make it a priority to correct the errors and minimize them in the future.”
Cervical Cancer Vaccine Duo Get Their Due
Largely overlooked in the controversies surrounding the cervical cancer vaccine marketed by Merck -- Should it be marketed to young teen-age girls? Why does it cost $400 for a series of shots? -- is the fact that two National Institutes of Health scientists discovered the vaccine. Today's Washington Post business section reports that dynamic duo -- Douglas R. Lowy and John T. Schiller -- are up for an award. This discovery follows the usual pattern: the truly inventive steps in drug discovery are often done by public sector scientists and only after decades of research. Private sector firms then license those technologies and spend the large amounts of money needed to bring the new drugs or vaccines through clinical trials.
Didn't Anybody Agree With Brooks on Single-Payer?
The Times' conservative in-house columnist David Brooks last Friday dismissed single-payer health care as unacceptable to most Americans. Today, the paper ran six letters not only attacking his column, but making quite cogent arguments defending universal systems and in favor of expanding Medicare to cover the uninsured population in the U.S. The paper didn't print a single letter agreeing with the column. Bias, or an accurate reflection of the response? Perhaps the ombudsman could enlighten us next weekend.
FDA Questions Quality of Life Benefits of Epogen
The Wall Street Journal in its weekend edition gave a brief synopsis of the Food and Drug Administration's presentation for Tuesday's advisory committee meeting that will evaluate the safety of Epogen when given in high doses to dialysis patients. According to the paper, the quality-of-life studies that have been used to justify higher hemoglobin levels in patients, which have now been shown to cause increased heart attacks and strokes, "were limited and might not meet current regulatory standards." The story included a small error. Medicare does not begin cutting off payments for Epogen until hemoglobin levels reach 13 grams per deciliter, not the 10 g/dL mentioned in the paper.
Another Portal for Direct-to-Physician Advertising?
Reed-Elsevier, the largest academic and scientific publisher in the world, announces plans to make its oncology journals free to physicians on line in exchange for subjecting themselves to online advertising, most of which will undoubtedly come from the drug companies whose products are being reported on in the journals. Newspapers aren't the only print information outlets whose economic model is threatened by the internet. But is this the right answer?