Any time you hear someone use the phrase “death panels,” ask them if they are aware of a study of terminally ill lung cancer patients which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. It showed that those who chose palliative care and hospice lived three months longer and had a better quality of life, with fewer side effects, than those who opted for aggressive treatment.
Gooz News
Delivery system reform not guaranteed
Spending on health care is slowing down – a much-needed development since the nation’s long-term deficit problem is largely tied to projections that spending on Medicare and Medicaid will remain out of control.
But slowdowns have happened before, and there’s no guarantee that this one will last. The Supreme Court in the next few weeks could rule the entire health care reform law unconstitutional, which would be a blow to cost-control efforts since at least some of the recent slowdown is being attributed to delivery system changes sparked by the law.
Will high court tamper with cost-cutting reforms?
Spending on health care is slowing down – a much-needed development since the nation’s long-term deficit problem is largely tied to projections that spending on Medicare and Medicaid will remain out of control.
USPSTF – It’s about time
The numbers are stark. According to the United States Preventive Services Task Force, for every man whose death from prostate cancer is prevented through PSA screening, 40 become impotent or suffer incontinence problems, two have heart attacks and one a blood clot.
Then there’s the psychological harm of a “false positive” test result, which is 80 percent of all “positive” tests. They lead to unnecessary worry, follow-up biopsies, physical discomfort and even harm. Final grade: D.
Funding R&D: High prices, overuse a failed strategy
Much has been written about the travails of the pharmaceutical industry. Generic competition is reducing profitability as leading blockbuster drugs like Pfizer’s Lipitor lose patent protection. Biotech generic competition is on the horizon.
Consumers lose in latest FDA user fee bill; COI restraints disappear
Over the angry protests of consumer groups, Congress is moving rapidly – and in bipartisan fashion – to give drug and medical device companies an easier path to Food and Drug Administration approval for some products in exchange for sharply higher user fees to fund the agency.
Republicans run from voucher label
What’s in a name? Everything, it would appear, when it comes to describing Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, which the Republican-controlled House of Representatives backed in its budget resolution late last month. The plan would subsidize seniors’ purchase of private insurance plans instead of enrolling in traditional government-financed Medicare, although that would be preserved as an option. The government would finance a portion of the purchase.
Why the electronic medical record needs to be viewed as a medical device
Medicare cost control is working
Health care spending over the last two years has slowed to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. The conventional wisdom is that it reflected the recession-related reductions in demand by people who lost jobs and their health care coverage.
That could not have affected Medicare’s nearly 50 million beneficiaries, most of whom are retired. Yet Medicare spending slowed right along with the privately insured, suggesting something else was at work.
Anatomy of a walletectomy
It all began when Dr. Renee Hsia of the University of California at San Francisco received a simple request from a good friend who had checked into a local hospital for an emergency appendectomy. The fairly routine procedure took place 19,368 times during 2009 in California.
If it’s unnecessary, who cares which stent is better?
The Lancet in its latest edition has another “paradigm-shifting” study (its words) on whether invasive cardiologists should use bare metal or drug-eluting stents in people with coronary blockages. For those not following this issue, the medical literature has been bouncing like a yo-yo on the question of which stents — drug-eluting or bare-metal — are better at preventing thrombosis or blood clots that can form around the stents, which sometimes lead to heart attacks and require repeat operations.