By Alex Stein Steven Brill’s TIME MAGAZINE blockbuster article, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us, uncovers the CHARGEMASTER: a publicly undisclosed pricelist accountable for what we see in hospital bills. What we see there doesn’t look good: it includes acetaminophen sold for $1.50 a tablet (you can buy 100 of those for the…
By Joanna Sax A recent article in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (Vol. 41:1, pp. 315-22) nicely describes the contours of Physician Payment Sunshine Act (PPSA) on pharmaceutical marketing. Similar to other policies addressing financial conflicts of interest, the lion’s share of the PPSA focuses on disclosure. That is, pharmaceutical companies will be…
By Michelle Meyer [This is off-the-cuff live blogging, so apologies for any errors, typos, etc] First up is Mark Lange from Eli Lilly (who notes that he is here in his personal capacity only!), speaking about “Data Transparency and the Role of the FDA.” He prefaces his talk by noting that when he refers to…
[Posted on behalf of Nancy Dubler and Art Caplan] Surprising that for a week there was constant news from Boston. Minute by minute we heard details of carnage, searching, killing, lock down and capture. Now, pretty much, silence. The suspect, captured in a boat in a backyard in Watertown, is now both a prisoner and…
By Susannah Rose One of my primary areas of research is in conflicts of interest (COI). I generally focus on the financial relationships between physicians/researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. See Here Here and Here. However, COI researchers and policy makers need to expand our scope to include other health care professionals who have relationships with other…
Join us for an important meeting: Roundtable: Family, Privacy, Secrets & the Law March 7-8, 2013 March 7-8, 2013 University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law 500 West Baltimore Street Baltimore, MD 21201 March 7, 5 p.m. – Book Reading and signing by Jonathan Odell, author of The Healing March 8, 9 a.m.…
By Casey Thomson This week’s round-up discusses the upcoming cases relevant to bioethics in the Supreme Court, the benefits of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, the surprisingly low effectiveness rate of this year’s flu vaccine, and the problems with ACA’s Accountable Care Organizations. See below for details and more summaries: Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) shared a…
By Yoni Schenker [Disclaimer: I am not involved in this, and the views expressed here are entirely my own.] Concussions and Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) have been the dominant subject of concern in the sports world recently, and for good reason, but I would like to highlight an often overlooked and more general problem. Our athletes…
By Michelle Meyer As most readers are probably aware, the past few years have seen considerable media and clinical interest in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, neurodegenerative condition linked to, and thought to result from, concussions, blasts, and other forms of brain injury (including, importantly, repeated but milder sub-concussion-level injuries) that can lead to…
By Casey Thomson This week’s round-up looks at the problems of substandard drug prevalence abroad, NIH’s possible push for an anonymous grant-awarding process, and the Liverpool Care Pathway investigation. Check it out below! Dan Vorhaus (@genomicslawyer) included a link to a report on the recent launch of Personal Genome Launch Canada. The post…
