Category Archives: Health care

How Medical “Misbranding” Puts Patients at Risk

How the anodyne term “misbranding” covers conduct which can, and too often does, lead to higher patient death rates.

Clinical Trial Transparency Effort Encounters Deafening Silence in US Launch; Agnotology or Anechoic Effect?

A successful initiative in the UK to obtain more registration and publication of clinical trial data has had its US launch utterly ignored , not simply the mainstream media but also the logical suspects in the medical trade press and scholarly journals..

Godzilla vs. Mothra vs. You: The Health Care Industry Consolidates

Causes and consequences of consolidation in the health care industry

Media Hypes Praluent, the Next Expensive “Blockbuster” Not Yet Shown to Benefit Patients

Another example of the corruption of science: the press falls all over itself hyping Praluent, a new cholesterol-lowering drug with remarkably inconclusive clinical trial data behind it. As Roy Poses points out, “The clinical benefit of the drug was not evident in this trial.”

60% of the CEOs of America’s “Great Health Systems” Have No Educational Background in Health Care

Why having generic managers run health systems is a bad idea.

Meet the Hedge Funders and Billionaires Who Pillage Under the Shield of Philanthropy

For every dollar these billionaires give, they take 44 from the rest of us.

Wolf Richter: Private Equity Scrambles to Buy Primary Care Doctors, “Leverage” Their Patients

The new fad in private equity is to hoover up primary care practices, particularly ones that focus on Medicare, despite the lack of an economic model for increasing profits.

Health Insurance Prices Take Off: Worker Pay Stagnant

Lambert here: Shocker, huh? I remember thinking, when Obama said buying health insurance on the wonderful website would be like buying an airline ticket, “Oh! Price collusion!” So far, that hasn’t panned out (that I know of). But now it turns out that ObamaCare has encouraged another great feature of the airline industry: consolidation.

Who Benefits? – Rising Generic Drug Prices and the Case of Mylan’s Conflicted Property Purchases

It’s remarkable to see the level of obvious self-dealing at Mylan persist as long as it has. Be sure to read about how the former CEO was permitted to let his son use the company jet on behalf of his rock band.

Bill Clinton, Paid to Speak to Biotech Conference, Extolled $1000 Pill to Prevent “Liver Rot,” Despite Lack of Evidence that It Does

What won’t the Clintons do if the price tag is high enough? Now Bill is playing drug detailman.

ObamaCare’s Problems Continue to Fester: Cost, Complexity, Quality, Coverage, Corruption in Covered Calfornia.

Although the press isn’t covering the story, Covered California shows that ObamaCare is still a troubled program (unless rental extraction is your priority).

Boston Globe Misapplies Economic Theory to Defend High Drug Prices

This post serves to illustrate how “economics says” has become a magic talisman in political discourse. Invoking it generally results in the audience accepting what follows, even when it is patent nonsense. Here we see how an editorial writer abjectly misapplied economic theory to justify super-high drug prices.

More Barbarians at the Gates: Private Equity Puts Primary Care in Play

Via the work of the Health Care Renewal website, we’ve warned of the push for corporatized medical care and the danger that poses to patients. Here is another push to extract profit from bodies, that of private equity’s new appetite for primary care practices.