Headline of the day:

Bernie Madoff gets 150 years for running a Ponzi scheme that wiped out the life savings of his "investors." Does that mean that the investment bankers, hedge funds operators and insurance company executives whose subprime and derivative shenanigans turned everyone's 401-k into a 201-k will get 75 years?

And in the news:

The New York Times' top health care-related story today dresses up a rehash of gubernatorial concerns about putting more burdens on Medicaid by suggesting it is an effort by President Obama to move the health care debate out of Washington. . . . Kaiser Health News teams up with the Washington Post to explore a major contributor to rising health care costs -- avoidable hospitals readmissions, usually among the elderly chronically ill. "Their exerpiences of being readmitted time and again reflect many of the deficiencies in a fragmented, poorly conordinated health system geared toward acute care," Joanne Kenen writes. . . .

A subcommittee chaired by Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) traveled to Philadelphia to hear oncologist Gary Kao, who practiced at the local Veterans Administration hospital, defend his use of implanted radiation seeds to treat prostate cancer. A Times investigation claimed a high proportion of his operations had been botched. . . . Withdrawal symptoms associated with benzodiazepine use for anxiety draws attention from this Post article. . . .

The Economist magazine examines America's health care woes in a series of articles and concludes in this editorial that the two most important reforms for bending the cost curve down are eliminating the tax deduction for health care benefits and putting every doctor on a salary like they do at the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente. "Reform must aim to encourage more use of managed health care, provided by doctors who are salaried, or paid by results rather than for every catheter they insert," it concludes. . . .

Cancer drugs that prolong life two months or less should only be studied by National Institute of Health researchers if they cost less than $20,000 per course of treatment, two NIH scientists editorialize in the latest Journal of the National Cancer Institute (subscription required). Medpage Today summarized the article. The Wall Street Journal, which frequently editorializes in favor of unlimited access to unproven cancer therapies, buries a good overview story on the high cost of cancer drugs on page D4. . . .

Johnson & Johnson won a $1.67 billion patent infringement case against Abbott Labs, the Wall Street Journal reports. The case involved rival biologic treatments, Remicade and Humira, that target tumor necrosis factor to treat  rheumatoid arthritis. . . .