Here's one of the consequences of the new health reform law you might have missed: The number of people seeking treatment for addiction could double, depending upon how many states expand Medicaid programs and how many addicts take advantage of them.
And for many of them, there will be no place to go....
Here's one of the consequences of the new health reform law you might have missed: The number of people seeking treatment for addiction could double, depending upon how many states expand Medicaid programs and how many addicts take advantage of them.
And for many of them, there will be no place to go. "In more than two thirds of the states, treatment clinics are already at or approaching 100 percent capacity," writes Carla K. Johnson (photo) of The Associated Press. That comes from a piece in which Johnson compared federal government data on addiction rates in the 50 states, the capacity of existing treatment programs, and the provisions of the new healthcare law.
The surge of new patients is "expected to push a marginal part of the health care system out of church...
Tests done at the now bankrupt Cetero Research lab in Houston to assure the safety of drugs seeking FDA approval were, in many cases, fraudulent, according to an investigation by Rob Garver...
Tests done at the now bankrupt Cetero Research lab in Houston to assure the safety of drugs seeking FDA approval were, in many cases, fraudulent, according to an investigation by Rob Garver and Charles Seife at ProPublica.
In a long story that appeared last week, they reported that "about 100 drugs, including sophisticated chemotherapy compounds and addictive prescription painkillers, had been approved for sale in the United States at least in part on the strength of Cetero Houston's tainted tests."
Astonishingly, Garver and Seife reported that the FDA has apparently not taken any action on the drugs that were approved on the basis of fraudulent testing, and it has not even revealed what those drugs are. "To this day, the agency refuses to disclose the names of the...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin analogues--genetically engineered insulin replacements--show no compelling advantages over human insulin but cost two to four times as much.
We've heard this kind of story before, but it's worth remembering that despite outsiders' attempts to uncover and discourage such things, the pharmaceutical industry continues, in at least some circumstances, to value marketing over research. And that is precisely where reporters should go to make the distinction and to clarify what's going on--which is what Newman does here.
-Paul Raeburn
Two weeks ago, I posted...
Two weeks ago, I posted an item calling out Ezekiel Emanuel, the noted oncologist, biologist, and former White House adviser, for an Op-Ed he wrote in The New York Times. I said the story, about a pressing shortage of cancer drugs, was poorly done. And I arrogantly noted that almost any journeyman science writer, with far less credentials and public esteem than Emanuel, could do a better job. "Never send a man to do a journalist's job," I wrote.
Now, it's time to do a little ground-truthing on that. A number of science...
Even the pharmaceutical industry cannot decide what it costs to bring a new drug to market...
Even the pharmaceutical industry cannot decide what it costs to bring a new drug to market.
PhRMA, the industry trade group, says here that, for a new drug, "winning approval, on average, takes 15 years of R&D and costs more than $1 billion." In a little cartoon Youtube video that explains how drugs win approval, it says the cost is $1.3-$1.6 billion. And the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, an industry-supported group, says in its most recent report that the "the...
I know I shouldn't post on an article I haven't read in its entirety--but I couldn't get through...
I know I shouldn't post on an article I haven't read in its entirety--but I couldn't get through ProPublica's latest investigative project.
The project was a great undertaking, by all accounts--a detailed analysis showing that millions of dollars are flowing from drug companies to doctor-marketers, some of whom have blemished records and limited expertise in the drugs they are promoting.
It is the result of a massive collaboration involving ProPublica and five other big news organizations: ...
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