This Week's Health Industry News

End-of-life counseling part of new Medicare policy
The New York Times reported over the weekend that a provision of Health Care reform Legislation that was abandoned after it became the focus of conservative outrage is making a return, this time as part of a new policy outlined in a Medicare Regulation. Voluntary counseling on end-of-life decisions was attacked by conservative pundits and politicians throughout the debate over Health Care reform, eventually labeled as “Death Panels.” The service would require Medicare to pay for end-...

North Carolina editorial roundup
If you're over 65 and want to consult with your doctor about which life-prolonging medical treatments you'd want or not want if you were incapacitated and dying, should Medicare pay your doctor for offering that medical advice? If you've ever watched a spouse, son or daughter struggle with decisions about what an aging, comatose or terminally ill patient would want — feeding tube? ventilator? resuscitation? — then you know the importance of the patient himself or herself thinking thr...

Twitter roundup
BrendanNyhan Dec 28, 2010 at 1:01pm As predicted (https://j.mp/c9Fe3v), overemphasis on Obama staff as cause of/solution to structural political problems https://j.mp/gYxThi Blaming staff for structural problems - Brendan Nyhan Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010: During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious th... Obama's insular White House worries his allies - latimes.com Bren...

The Sunbird
Doctors will soon be able to receive Medicare payments for end-of-life planning. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit. Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make Health Care decisions for themselves. This is of course completel...

Led by California, Inspection Backlogs Weaken Dialysis Oversight
ProPublica, Dec. 28, 2010, 9:36 a.m. Valerie Prenkert is haunted each time she thinks of the small Northern California clinic where her mother got Dialysis. At the start of a treatment on Oct. 6, 2008, a clinic employee inserted a needle into her mother's arm improperly, puncturing the back wall of her blood vessel, court and medical records show. Less than two hours later, 67-year-old Jessie Kay Christiansen was dead from massive internal bleeding. The loss was shocking. So was a fact that Pr...

White House May Reintroduce 'Death Panels'
The Obama Administration has restored one of the most Controversial provisions of the new Health Care law. The New York Times reported the new policy will let the government pay doctors for end-of-life counseling. That counseling could include doctors discouraging patients from trying everything medically possible that might keep them alive. "The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking," said Elizabeth Wickham, Executive Director of LifeTree, a pro-life Christian educational ministry....

Media amnesia on "death panels" myth
One of the most frustrating aspects of the media's coverage of politics is the way they treat deceptive factual claims. As I've often pointed out, these claims are often reported in a "he said," "she said" format that provides readers with no indication that the statement in question is misleading or false. And even when reporters do characterize these statements accurately, it rarely creates a lasting precedent within their news organization. Instead, these outlets typically suffer a sort of ...

Video: Charles Krauthammer Offends PBS Mark Shields by Saying ObamaCare
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The biggest element in Debt is healthcare expenditures, Medicare and Medicaid, that’s where the money is, even more than Social Security. And the problem with ObamaCare is it freezes in place these huge expenditures. It does not cut costs. There’s going to be an additional half a Trillion in taxes devoted to the ObamaCare plan. And, it, it, it siphoned off whatever cuts you’re going to have in Medicare, half a trillion, for the new entitlements. So there is...

Today in Capitalism
Has anyone else noticed that every other ad on Cable Television these days is for Medicare Advantage plans? I guess “ObamaCare” didn’t kill Medicare Advantage after all. I also noticed a news story about a company called High Road Capital, which seems to be in the business of buying things, snapping up a whole lot of Health Care businesses. Private Equity firms have snapped up many companies that provide medical billing, coding and document processing this year in an effort ...

Fox News Tries To Rehabilitate Palins Discredited Death Panels Smear
As The New York Times reported yesterday, the Obama Administration has enacted Medicare Regulations to include an end-of-life planning provision similar to one struck out of the Health Care Reform Bill after Sarah Palin “touched off a political storm over ‘Death Panels.’” Palin’s “death panels” accusation wasn’t just a lie, it was PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year for 2009. But good ol’ Fox News resuscitated the lie and gave it new life by j...

Backdoor Death Panels?
When the Health Care overhaul was stumbling its way through Congress early this year, Sarah Palin was excoriated by Democrats for suggesting that the nascent law included “Death Panels” for the elderly in order to save costs of treating the oldest and Most Expensive patients. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Palin wrote that Obama had asked Congress to create an independent Medicare Advisory Council--an unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. She p...

Federal Government Manages Finances So Badly They Cant Be Audited
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated Financial Statements of the Federal Government, because of widespread material Internal Control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations. “Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be...

High risk fizzle?
Some pretty remarkable numbers in the Washington Post's story today on the apparent early fizzle of a key interim aspect of the Health Care Legislation: In the spring, the Medicare program's chief Actuary predicted that 375,000 people would sign up for the pool plans by the end of the year. Early last month, the Health and Human Services Department reported that just 8,000 people had enrolled...

The future of health care in the Tampa Bay Area
Beginning on January 1, 2011 the effects of the initial policy implementations of the Health Care Reform Act will be felt by both physicians and their patients. In speaking with family physicians, general practitioners and specialists in the Tampa Bay area, many have decided that they will retire or find another job prior to January 1, 2013, when they must begin to confer with the government in deciding your care or course of treatment. With over thirty million people being added to the health c...

MannKind's inhaled insulin verdict delayed
The company said it was notified of the delay by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday. In July, the regulator had accepted a resubmission on the product -- a drug-device combination Insulin Therapy being developed for the treatment of Diabetes -- and classified it a class 2 response. The company's shares, which have gained nearly 24 percent this month ahead of the previously expected FDA decision, closed at $7.97 Monday on NASDAQ. (Reporting by Esha Dey in Bangalore; Editing by Vyas ...

Ruling on new diabetes treatment delayed
Federal Regulators need another four weeks to review an inhaled Insulin product to treat Diabetes, the drug's manufacturer announced Tuesday morning. MannKind Corp. is awaiting a Food and Drug Administration ruling on Afrezza, which would be the first-ever inhalable Insulin drug.The inhaler device, which delivers Insulin through single-dose cartridges, was rejected by the FDA in March, when the agency requested more information from MannKind. According to the company, the FDA informed it on M...

MannKind's inhaled insulin verdict delayed
Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:28am EST n">(Reuters) - Inhaled-insulin developer MannKind Corp (MNKD.O) said the U.S. health regulator would not be able to complete the review of Afrezza by December 29 and would require about four more weeks. The company said it was notified of the delay by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday. In July, the regulator had accepted a resubmission on the product -- a drug-device combination Insulin Therapy being developed for the treatment of Diabetes -- and clas...

Berwick Sets Up Death Panels By Fiat
"If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -- Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Sarah Palin was right. John Boehner -- make that Speaker-elect of the House John Boehner -- was right. While Americans were busy celebrating with family and friends and presumably not paying attention to the news, the New York Times, in a story ironically dated Christmas Day -- a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace -- reported the foll...

'Death panels' controversy: Is Obama avoiding Congress? (The Christian Science Monitor)
Washington – In a move that could resuscitate the partisan battle over what Sarah Palin dubbed "Death Panels," the Obama Administration is set to implement a Controversial federal health-care provision by executive authority. The new rule would pay doctors to consult with Medicare patients who want voluntary counseling about health-care options in the case of terminal illness. The Obama Administration casts the change as minor, saying that these are common-sense discussions t...

FDA's Avastin decision is a breast cancer patient's worst nightmare
On Dec. 16, the Food and Drug Administration made a decision that could cause thousands of breast Cancer Patients to lose their last hope. That day, FDA officials voted to revoke approval for Avastin for the treatment of late-stage Breast Cancer. This move is a disgrace. Avastin reduces blood flow to tumors, allowing it to halt the spread of breast Cancer in some patients. In one Clinical Trial, 52 percent of Avastin users saw their tumors stop growing or spreading to other parts of their bodie...

Pill mills still going strong
When it comes to the unsavory and downright illegal, South Florida owns the market in healthcare scams. Miami-Dade County is the nation's Epicenter of Medicare Fraud. Broward County is the state's biggest black market in prescription pain killers like Oxycodone. By now, many of the pill mills should have been shut down. They're not. Thanks to lax state Oversight, walk-in pain clinics have flourished in Florida in the last three years. A 2009 Miami Herald series highlighted the proliferation of t...

Three-quarters of U.S. uninsured employed
MENLO PARK, Calif., Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Seventy-five percent of the some 50 million of the U.S. population with no Health Insurance come from Working Families, researchers say. The report by the Kaiser Family Foundation says 57 percent of people in the U.S. under age 65 receive health Insurance Coverage as an employer benefit. Medicare covers virtually all those who are age 65 years and older, but the non-elderly who do not have access to or cannot afford private Insurance now go without health co...

Plucking the Lucky Duckies
When Democrats find themselves on the ropes - electorally speaking - one of the tried and true methods used to gin up some fresh support has traditionally been to invoke the age old cries of class warfare. You know the drill: the government is inherently Racist or they want all women to stay out of the boardroom and go back to being barefoot and pregnant in the bedroom. But when you’ve got an African-American in the White House and fresh new female faces marching off to serve i...

Injustice for All: Obama's Immigration Agenda
-- spied more aggressively than ever on Americans; -- destroyed decades of hard won Labor Rights; -- targeted Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for erosion and elimination; -- further institutionalized public wealth transfers to super-rich elites who already have too much; -- commodified public education; -- subverted Net Neutrality; -- targeted Whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and Animal Rights Activists as Terrorists; -- militarized Haiti, engineered fraudulent ele...

Have You Been Fooled by the These Dirty Pharma Marketing Tricks?
Faux Patient Groups Ever wonder how patient groups lobbying FDA to approve some expensive drug you've never heard of suddenly appear? Replete with tears and sob stories? The patient front groups, sometimes called Astroturf, are aggregated and orchestrated by pharma. One of the largest, the "Grassroots" National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), lobbies Medicaid programs not to substitute less expensive drugs and was investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley for undisclosed pharma links. How can ...