Essays on Employee Health Benefits and Other Health Care Topics, Hosted by Brian Klepper
Brian Klepper
Posted 10/28/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog
At our first meeting years ago, Tom Emerick, Walmart’s then VP of Global Benefits, told me,
“No industry can grow indefinitely at a multiple of general inflation. It will eventually become so expensive that purchasers will simply abandon it.”
Patricia Salber
Posted 10/17/11 on The Doctor Weighs In
The 99% are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any longer. They are sick and tired of Wall Street insiders getting richer and richer while the millions of Main Streeters keep on losing ground.
Today marks the one month anniversary of a movement that pundits initially thought had little chance of lasting. Instead of fading away, the Occupy protests are metastasizing across the globe with demonstrations in London, Rome, Chicago, Tokyo and even in Paraguay…Paraguay, for God’s sake. Some people are saying the Occupy movements are the “Arab Spring” of the West. People, empowered by technology, are refusing to accept the status quo that protects the interests of a few.
Patricia Salber
First posted 7/14/11 on The Doctor Weighs In
Eric Topol, MD wrote an interesting commentary in the July 7, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, titled “The Lost Decade of Nesiritide.” Nesiritide is a drug for heart failure symptoms (e.g., shortness of breath) that was approved by the FDA in 2001. Since that time, according to Dr. Topol, “well more than $1 Billion was wasted on purchasing the drug.”
It turns out that the FDA approved the drug was based on a relatively small, not particularly well done clinical trial that showed improvement in self-reported symptoms of shortness of breath 3 hours after the drug was administered. Once the drug was approved, the drug was marketed like crazy. For profit outpatient heart failure “tune up” clinics opened so that heart failure patients could get weekly intravenous infusions of the drug.
Continue reading “Niseritide, the “Lost Decade”, and the Pinto”
