Two months from now we will be in mid-winter, late January. How about four days in warm, sunny West Palm Beach, Florida? All-expenses-paid. How inviting. But how troubling. Once again. An email was sent to journalists this week announcing this junket funded by Bayer, a multinational drug company. More
For the past 11 years, HealthNewsReview.org has helped journalists find industry-independent experts to use as sources in their stories. It’s an effort begun by journalists Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee (now a VP at the Lown Institute), but joined by me and Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD, of Georgetown not long after. More
For a hospital that had once labored to break even, Wheeling Hospital displayed abnormally deep pockets when recruiting doctors. To lure Dr. Adam Tune, an anesthesiologist from nearby Pittsburgh who specialized in pain management, the Catholic hospital built a clinic for him to run on its campus in Wheeling, West Virginia. It paid Tune as much as $1.2 million a year—well above the salaries of 90 percent of pain management physicians across the nation, the federal government charged in a lawsuit filed this spring. “If we’re going to solve the health care pricing problem, these kinds of practices are going to have to go away,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit that advocates for affordable care. More