The Basics of Pharma Kickbacks – Opaque & Complex

Mike Magee With great fanfare, the New York Times announced this week that UnitedHealthcare “would stop keeping millions of dollars in discounts it gets from drug companies and share them with its customers.” For awhile, pharma, insurers, pharmacies and PBMs have been pointing fingers at each other over escalating costs. That’s become more difficult of […]

Pharma Patents – A Good Bet For Casino Heavy Native Americans.

The Latest Pharma Campus? Mike Magee In the immediate aftermath of WW II, the U.S. government decided to join hands with industry and academia and fund a campaign to “defeat disease” as they had defeated the Nazi’s. Defeat disease and health will be left in its wake was the thinking of the day. What they […]

Compounding Our Weaknesses – Gray Market Drug Collusion.

Mike Magee In the realm of pharmaceutical disaster deja vu, Tennessee deserves special recognition. In early September, 1937, the S.E. Massengill Company of Bristol, Tennessee, distributed tainted elixir of sulfanilamide nationwide. Before the disaster ended, 104 patients, most of them children, had died. Nearly 80 years latter to the date, Dr. April Petit put in […]

Substituting Robust Marketing For Scientific Evidence: Industry Pursues Legal “Free Hand” For Off-Label Promotion.

SOURCE: OFF LABEL: A FILM Mike Magee Over the past fourteen years, the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. has successfully beaten back proposals to allow drug reimportation from Canada. These proposals were advanced by multiple members of Congress and big city mayors, and were supported by the majority of Americans. But President Bush, in negotiations […]

Iglehart and Thompson: Does the AMA Need “A Different Model of Advocacy”?

John Iglehart and Jeff Thompson MD The AMA’s vigorous opposition this week to the FDA’s consideration of mandating training for opioid prescribers to curb the current opioid epidemic (which the AMA’s liberal policies toward specialty designation and pharmaceutical underwriting helped create), called to mind the words in 2009 of Gundersen-Lutheran neonatologist and CEO, Jeff Thompson in […]

Resetting Our Biases: Entering A New Stage of “Health Enlightenment”

Mike Magee This week, the Washington Post published a lengthy piece focused on Medicare Part D, its history, and how it might be improved.(1) The suggestions – ranging from mining data to requiring diagnostic codes on prescriptions – zeroed in on “better prescribing”. What they missed completely was a simpler strategy with arguably greater benefit […]