Delusional thinking about clinical trials

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 [...]

Ten things every American should know about health care costs

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 [...]

Approval of safe drugs without effectiveness data: is it a real option?

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 [...]

Understanding the misinformed health care consumer

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 [...]