So where do you stand?
I'm not sure where the citizen stands if you take a look at how Big Pharma pulled the wool over the eyes of Congress and AARP for the now known to be ruinous Senior Drug Health Plan (Part D). It just looks like it is all going from bad to worse, or to $#%^ in a hand basket.
Perhaps you should peruse the following two articles, think about what it means for you, and let you representatives know exactly what you think.
See Pfizer tips for managing journalists which is certainly a good idea as Pfizer is poised to release its ties to doctors.
Cash-strapped U.S. patients may be skipping drugs
Feb 10, 2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Americans with financial worries because of the ailing economy may be skipping needed prescription drugs in a wrong-headed attempt to save money, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
Nearly 95 percent of doctors surveyed by Epocrates Inc. said they have some concern that patients may not be taking a prescribed drug correctly because of the economic climate.
The biggest concern among the 700 doctors surveyed was that patients were simply not filling prescriptions or skipping doses. The doctors also said they believed some patients were splitting pills.
The healthcare information company said 55 percent of the physicians surveyed said they wrote more prescriptions for generic drugs, which are cheaper than patented drugs, in 2008 than in 2007.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Will Dunham and Eric Walsh)
Copyright © 2009 Reuters Limited
Sobering results for cost-cutting Medicare projectBy LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner
Feb 10, 2009
CHICAGO – An ambitious effort to cut costs and keep aging, sick Medicare patients out of the hospital mostly didn't work, a government-contracted study found. The disappointing results show how tough it is to manage older patients with chronic diseases, who often take multiple prescriptions, see many different doctors and sometimes get conflicting medical advice.
The study showed just how hard it is to change the habits of older patients and their sometimes inflexible doctors. And it points up the challenges the Obama administration will face in trying to reform health care for an aging nation.
Most of the patients had serious, but common, age-related illnesses including diabetes, heart disease and lung disease. Programs were set up at 15 centers around the country. Only two cut the number of times these patients were hospitalized, and those are still in operation. None saved Medicare any money.
The authors of the study called the results "underwhelming." An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, where the study appears Wednesday, used the term "sobering."
"The only way you can really do it is by changing patients' behavior and by changing physicians' behavior, and both things are really hard to do," said study author Randall Brown, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research Inc., in Princeton, N.J., which was hired to evaluate the programs.
Often, these patients need to stop smoking, or lose weight, exercise more, eat healthier foods — a challenge even for generally healthy people. Those changes are especially tough for sick, older patients who often are set in their ways.
"The same thing with physicians," Brown said. "A lot of them feel like they know how to take care of patients, so why do they need a nurse calling up and asking them why the patient isn't on some certain medication?"
Many patients in the study had more than one chronic disease, a common Medicare scenario. In 2002 alone, half of Medicare patients had been treated for five or more ailments, and they accounted for 75 percent of Medicare spending, the study authors noted.
Seeking ways to reduce those costs and improve care, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services selected 15 proposals for test-site programs in 2002. The sites developed their own programs, enrolling a total of 18,309 fee-for-service Medicare patients through 2006.
About half got the patients got the usual care. The others got more intensive, coordinated care. That often involved nurses who acted as go-betweens, helping doctors give patients clear, appropriate advice; counseling patients on changing bad habits and recognizing worrisome symptoms. The nurses were available on a regular basis by phone or in person to answer patients' questions.
Jim Reid, a 74-year-old retired Pennsylvania welder, was among study patients who got coordinated care.
When he enrolled in 2002 in a test program run by Health Quality Partners, a nonprofit group in Doylestown, Pa., he was obese, had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and pre-diabetes.
But Reid was a rare success story.
He actually took the advice offered in group sessions run by nurses. He learned how to read food labels and avoid salty, calorie-laden foods. He also started exercising, walking with a pedometer and building up to a few miles daily.
Now, he breakfasts on oatmeal or vegetable omelets instead of coffee and doughnuts He's lost almost 60 pounds. His blood pressure and cholesterol have greatly improved and his pre-diabetes is gone.
Sticking with the program "is hard," he acknowledged. "As you get older, you don't want to do it." But he said it has "put an extra 10 years in my life."
Reid credits his success to the personal attention of a nurse coordinator.
"I have to have somebody to own up to," he said.
That close, in-person contact with nurses was also a feature of the project's other more successful, still-operating program, at Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa in Mason City, Iowa.
In both programs, each patient had face-to-face contact an average of about once a month with a nurse. That was far more frequent personal contact than in other programs. Both reduced hospitalizations — 17 percent yearly compared with usual-care patients at Mercy, and by about 20 percent in the Pennsylvania program, but only among its sicker patients. That program worked with Doylestown Hospital and recruited patients from area physicians' offices.
Targeting sicker patients and providing frequent in-person contact show the approach has some benefits and that success with future reform efforts "is possible, but it's not easy," Brown said.
Peter Ashkenaz, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said the agency is evaluating the Iowa and Pennsylvania programs to see if their positive results persist.
He said there are other approaches being tested, some that offer incentives to doctors who meet quality benchmarks, or who use electronic health records to improve quality.
But so far, Ashkenaz said, "as the study shows, we have not yet found broad success."
___
On the Net:
JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: http://www.cms.hhs.gov
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
FEBRUARY 9, 2009,
Drug Makers Fight Stimulus Provision By ALICIA MUNDY
WASHINGTON -- The drug and medical-device industries are mobilizing to gut a provision in the stimulus bill that would spend $1.1 billion on research comparing medical treatments, portraying it as the first step to government rationing.
The fight over the provision is highlighting the tensions behind President Barack Obama's plan to overhaul the health-care system. The administration hopes to expand coverage while limiting use of treatments that don't work well, but any efforts that might reduce coverage are politically sensitive.
The House version of the stimulus package sent shudders through the drug and medical-device industry. In a staff report describing the bill, the House said treatments found to be less effective and in some cases more expensive "will no longer be prescribed."
A Senate version backed by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) doesn't mention cost as a subject to be studied. And the industry won a battle to add the word "clinical" in describing the research -- adding to the implication that the comparison studies won't look at bang for the buck. The final language is likely to be hammered out later this week in a House-Senate conference committee.
Mr. Obama is under pressure to find long-run health-cost savings as projections show that Medicare spending is on track to severely deplete the federal budget. "Without question, we're headed for more of a public and private push for which medicines work best at the lowest cost in particular patients," said Mark McClellan, former Medicare and Medicaid chief under President George W. Bush.
The $1.1 billion in research funding would be doled out to the National Institutes of Health and other government bodies. "We should focus on producing the best unbiased science possible," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), a strong proponent of the House language.
Mr. Obama supported research into comparative effectiveness during his campaign. Administration officials and leading Democrats in Congress say the idea will help government programs direct their dollars to treatments that are worth the money.
Officially, drug and device makers don't object to that sentiment. But they warn of a slippery slope where the government ends up axing useful treatments just because they cost too much. They have lined up patient groups that get industry funding to lobby Capitol Hill.
A coalition called the Partnership to Improve Patient Care includes the lobbying arms of the drug, device and biotechnology industries as well as patient-advocacy groups and medical-professional societies. Coalition spokesman David Di Martino says the research envisioned in the House bill may be used "in an inappropriate manner that may limit treatment options for patients."
A public-relations firm that is part of one of Washington's most influential lobby shops, Barbour Griffith Rogers, is representing the coalition. A major goal is to give industry a seat at the table when federal officials decide what to research with the $1.1 billion.
Companies "want to control the data, how it is reviewed, evaluated, and whether the public and government find out about it and use it," said Harry Selker, a Tufts University professor who directs its clinical-research program.
That also worries Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School, a frequent drug-industry critic. Comparative research "has the potential to tell us which drugs and treatments are safe, and which ones work," he said. "This is not information that the private sector will generate on its own, or that the industry wants to share."
Michael Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute said comparative effectiveness research "isn't going to do any good because the industry will defund it as soon as it presents a threat."
When the government's Agency for Health Research Quality suggested in 1995 that there were too many unnecessary back surgeries, doctors and industry groups attacked the conclusion. Mr. Cannon noted that Congress at the time slashed the agency's budget and stripped its authority to make medicare-payment recommendations.
"They almost killed AHRQ," said Dr. Avorn. "The memory of their near-death experience hasn't been forgotten."
Dr. McClellan, the former Medicare chief, said effectiveness research can be useful but shouldn't assume pricey medicines are automatically bad. "The goal isn't to avoid expensive drugs, it's to get more value for our health-care spending," he said.
—Jacob Goldstein contributed to this article.
Alicia Mundy at alicia.mundy@wsj.com
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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