The week before Thanksgiving, in the freezing rain, a group of patients, nurses, physicians and activists, organized by the Right Care Alliance, marched on the Sanofi drug company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sanofi had been marking up its insulin products by as much as 4,500 percent over to the estimated cost of producing a single vial — and people with type 1 diabetes were starting to die. Led by grieving mothers, we carried the ashes of their children to the insulin manufacturer demanding it cut its prices.
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Do FDA rules make it too difficult for new diagnostic tests to be approved? Or is it too easy?
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A new study shows that in pharmaceutical marketing, the number of doctors you target may matter more than the amount of money you give them.Â
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Why can't we get better price transparency for health care services in hospitals? Because the "real" price doesn't exist...
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A drug company topped a list of the worst actors in US healthcare for the second year in a row, but other industry sectors—such as hospitals, physicians, and insurers—gained ground in the second annual Shkreli Awards.1
“This year we quite intentionally cast a wider net than just the well known and insane greed of the pharmaceutical sector,” said Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, an advocacy group that bestows the awards, in an email. “We wanted to make the point that profiteering has become rampant and is not confined to any one particular sector of the healthcare enterprise.”
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In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer explain why the FDA's proposed changes are unlikely to make a real difference in medical device safety.
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“Whenever pharma or a hospital spends money on advertising, we the patients pay for it — through higher prices for drugs and hospital services,” said Shannon Brownlee, senior vice president of the Lown Institute, a Brookline, Mass., nonprofit that advocates for affordable care. “Marketing is built into the cost of care.”
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Ten years ago, Kathleen Yaremchuk raced to the bedside of a patient inexplicably gasping for breath. Chair of the department of otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Yaremchuk performed an emergency tracheotomy on the woman, cutting a hole in her windpipe, inserting a breathing tube and saving her life. When Yaremchuk began getting more calls over the following months for mysterious cases of respiratory distress, she launched a study to figure out what was going on.
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One of the things that I’m most proud of about my team’s work is that we didn’t merely grade performance. We offered constructive criticism intended to improve performance.
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An analysis by Modern Healthcare finds that reported spending on community benefits by hospitals leave out important information, and vary widely between hospitals across the country.
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Halloween is time for costumes, spooky stories, and... drug advertisements?
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A new report reveals how drugmaker Abbvie has abused the patent system to delay competition for its bestselling drug.
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As the annual "best hospital" rankings have been released, we revisit our analysis of how hospitals get to be top-ranked.
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Non-profit hospitals are finally being taxed on excessive CEO pay, but some are trying to find loopholes around the law.
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The Pittsburgh health system giant is putting profits over patients with their proposed expansion, say Shannon Brownlee and Vikas Saini.
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Ever wonder why you can't get a straight answer about how much a test or procedure in the hospital? This new report has answers.
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Gina Kolata misrepresents the debate on tPA for strokes by painting the issue as evidence versus belief.
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Recent conflicts of interest in medicine and health policy you probably missed...
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A closer look at the hundreds of millions that pharma spends on payments to physicians.
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A closer look at the hundreds of millions that pharma spends on payments to physicians.
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