Gee, here’s a shocker! … The way that organized medicine and the media (and unfortunately pharmaceutical companies too!) discuss “advances in medicine” and “health risks” isn’t necessarily good for your “health.” What’s really shocking about this is that this report appeared in today’s Washington Post.
The local TV news mavens almost always get everything wrong when [...]
Filed under: Health and drug costs, health economics | Comments Off
According to a report published in the Daily Telegraph, the Department of Health in the UK has given approval to a network of 19 hospital units where terminally ill cancer patients can volunteer to participate in trials of experimental cancer therapies that may be years away from being approved. Apparently the first of these Centres for Experimental [...]
Filed under: Drug approvals and regulation, Drug development / clinical trials | Comments Off
Interviewed for an article in today’s issue of the Financial Times, the newly reinstated head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Janet Woodcock, has stoutly and rightly defended the the FDA’s recent decisions not to approve a number of recent NDAs, stating that science, and not politics or pricing, is and has always [...]
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To my surprise, there’s been an almost deathly silence about the new, experimental “differential pricing” strategy for GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceuticals that the Financial Times reported on last week. If you didn’t see the story, click here to get the scoop.
As far as I am aware, GSK hasn’t commented publicly on this story at all, and that may [...]
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Here’s a turnabout for the books.
Most of the time we see market research showing how consumers are concerned about a range of pharmaceutical industry issues (from access to drug prices to salaries of CEOs). This weekend we saw something rather different! Data from a survey published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) and [...]
Filed under: Drug development / clinical trials, Health and drug costs, health economics | Tagged: pharmaceuticals UK pricing R&D | Comments Off
FDA bashing is a sport with a long history. Some players have been at it for years. Others are newer to the game. However, regardless of the reasons for participation in this sport, I now believe it should — like fox hunting — be either banned or at least highly controlled, for several reasons.
Filed under: Drug approvals and regulation | Tagged: FDA, oncology drugs, Wall Street Journal | 2 Comments »
Just a few days ago, USA Today (in conjunction with the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health) published a report on public perceptions about prescription drugs and pharmaceutical companies. The full report can be found on the Kaiser Family Foundation web site.
The results of this survey, which encompassed nearly 1700 American [...]
Filed under: Health and drug costs | Tagged: biologics, drug prices, expectations, perceptions, pharmaceuticals, value | Comments Off
In a extraordinarily strange article, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Analysis has recently suggested that clinical trials of new drugs should be conducted by “a network of independent companies” that would ensure some form of complete security regarding the quality and meaningfulness of these trials. He also suggests that there would [...]
Filed under: Drug development / clinical trials | Tagged: clinical trials, cooperative groups, economics, FDA, pharmaceuticals, regulatory affairs | Comments Off
Here’s some food for thought.
In 2006 the total cost of healthcare in America was $2105.5 billion. That’s an average of $7018.33 for every man, woman, and child living in America today.
The three largest components of this total cost were: (a) hospitals, at 30 per cent or $604.7 billion; (b) doctors’ offices, at 21 percent or [...]
Filed under: Health and drug costs | Tagged: drug costs, Health costs, hospital costs, patient assistance, physician costs | 2 Comments »
The biotech investor community and many others have demonstrated profound difficulty in recent years when it comes to understanding the premises behind FDA approval of new drugs.The FDA sets out to evaluate new drugs based on their risk/benefit ratio, which inevitably varies significantly by disease state. So, for example, a new drug that provided a [...]
Filed under: Drug approvals and regulation | Tagged: Abigail Alliance, drug approval, effective, FDA, Provenge, safe | Comments Off
Here’s something interesting I discovered the other day.
A massive 96 percent of US consumers believe that the cost of prescription pharmaceuticals makes up more than 15 percent of the total cost of American healthcare today. Worse still, 63 percent of American consumers believe that prescription drug costs account for between 40 and 79 percent of [...]
Filed under: Health and drug costs | Tagged: drug costs, health care, out-of-pocket costs, perception | Comments Off
