Results tagged “healthcare reform” from Drugs & Medicaments

Pfizer Inc., Amgen Inc. and the rest of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry awoke to a new reality this week: a Congress controlled by Democrats determined to impose costly restrictions on their business.

Five committees are planning investigations into how to lower prices paid by Medicare, improve drug-safety enforcement and make generic medications available faster. Further probes and policy salvos may follow.

The pharmaceutical firms depend on a friendly federal government: A sixth of 2006 growth in the $252 billion U.S. drug market came from Medicare, according to estimates from IMS Health Inc., a Fairfield, Conn.-based research firm. Moreover, both Democrats and the companies are well aware that the industry gave at least two-thirds of its political donations to Republicans in recent elections.

HealthDay News  -- The deadline for enrolling in or changing your Medicare prescription drug plan is fast approaching, and experts agree that you need to choose carefully because premiums have increased and drug coverage has changed in many plans.

"In terms of premium increases, 77 percent of drug plan enrollees are in plans where premiums will be increasing," said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The deadline for picking a plan for 2007 is Dec. 31, and that decision can't be changed again until next November.

However, if a recent survey holds true, many seniors will simply stick with what they've got.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is introducing a new proposal to provide affordable, high quality, private health coverage for everyone regardless of where they work or live with the Healthy Americans Act.

"The Healthy Americans Act provides a guarantee -- health coverage for every American that is at least as good as Members of Congress receive and can never be taken away," Wyden explained. "The Act provides universal coverage for no more money than our country spends today. Better care, financial health and security, no increase in costs."

How much is one month of life worth?

It's a question that has split governments, bankrupted patients and left hospitals with an agonizing moral dilemma.

Health Canada has approved drugs that prolong the life of cancer patients.

They're expensive. They're not a cure. And usually they only give the patient months more to live.

Patients think they're worth every penny.

Governments can't agree. Some provinces pay. Others say they're not worth the small benefit to a few.

TennCare officials say they want to spend $6.2 million on preventive measures that will help enrollees take better care of themselves and avoid serious illnesses.

The request is part of $99.3 million needed from the state to make improvements to the expanded Medicaid program, officials told Gov. Phil Bredesen during state budget hearings today.

"Some of our enrollees need extra help in how they should take care of themselves," said Dr. Wendy Long, TennCare's chief medical officer.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization launched on Monday its first intergovernmental review of the pharmaceutical sector to try to find ways of making medicine more easily available to the world's poorest people.

In their five-day talks, the World Health Organization's 193 member countries are expected to look at how international patents limit access by keeping drug prices high, and to highlight areas now lacking investment, such as tropical and parasitic diseases.

A WHO commissioned report earlier this year drawn up by former Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss slammed the existing drug development, marketing and pricing system.

WASHINGTON - States should be given more freedom to enroll the poorest of the poor into managed care programs and adopt changes that have worked elsewhere, a Medicaid reform panel recommended Friday.

However, Democratic lawmakers have contended that the panel, formed nearly 18 months ago by the Bush administration, has lacked independence. Now that the Democrats control Congress, some analysts are predicting the group's recommendations will be "dead on arrival."

"While some in Congress thought this effort would bear fruit, I see no proof of that in this report," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. "It is the job of the Congress to review the Medicaid program and legislate necessary changes, not a hand-picked commission stacked against working families."

Policy makers are expected to spend the next two years cementing their positions on how to fix the out-of-control costs, mediocre quality, and high uninsured rates plaguing the U.S. health care system.

But it doesn't look like the public is going to be much help.

A national survey released Tuesday showed that eight in 10 American adults believe that the health system has problems and needs improvement. But while that may sound like a consensus for big changes, respondents confirmed what researchers noticed long ago: few are willing to sacrifice to get them.

The technology for calibrating transparent rating scale-based measures of health and functional status is over 50 years old.^[1] It is well researched and documented. It has been used to construct scientifically and legally defensible admissions and professional certification tests for over 30 years, in healthcare and other industries.^[2,3]

So how is it that this technology is virtually unknown in health services research? I say virtually unknown, because there are a growing number of applications in healthcare of the mathematical models at issue.^[4]

What healthcare does not have, however, is an overarching plan for decentralized networks of different brands and configurations of instruments that measure the same things in the same units.

by Robert M Centor, MD

While thinking about how to answer this question, I have changed my list several times. My first list included malpractice reform, but I have since decided that although malpractice is a major issue, it does not make my top 3.

The best way to address such a question is to consider the biggest problems with our current healthcare system. In addition to malpractice, I have weighed issues such as transitions of care between different sites, medical training, and continuing education. However, I must restrict my list to 3, so here are my top issues in 2006: access to excellent generalists; accurate, complete patient data; and better pharmaceutical data.

My first reform would be to create an agency to perform unbiased research on proposed new drugs. Each pharmaceutical company would have to help fund this agency, but it would need to be kept free of drug company influence. The agency would have the responsibility of determining drug safety and efficacy as well as determining relative efficacy of different drugs.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Healthcare reform will emerge as a key political issue over the next two years, says Joel E. Miller, senior vice president for operations at the National Coalition on Health Care.

"Because more and more employers are dropping coverage and more and more workers are deciding that coverage is too expensive even when it's offered, we think that over the next couple of years there will be a full-scale debate on health reform leading up to the presidential elections," he said.

The number of uninsured Americans rose 800,000 between 2003 and 2004 and has increased by 6 million since 2000, according to the NCHC. Approximately 46 million Americans, or 15.7 percent of the population, were without health insurance in 2004, according to the latest government data available.

PARIS (Reuters) - The French, among Europe's most avid consumers of prescription drugs, are popping fewer pills and powders -- not because they have become healthier, but because the government is on a mission to cut the country's healthcare bill.

In a major break with previous years, growth in medicine sales has slowed this year, to just 1 percent in the year to August compared with 5 to 7 percent between 1990 and 2005.

Drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis has announced job cuts in France and Germany and French sector body LEEM has warned of more to come, urging the government to see drugs not just as a cost but as products that help the economy and jobs.