BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
Choosing Between Saving Lives and Saving
a Fortune
“To understand something about the spiraling cost of health care in the United States,
we might begin with a typical conundrum: … Should [a] doctor prescribe the best
possible medicine, assuming that [a patient] has private health insurance that will
pay the bulk of the costs? Or should [the doctor] try to conserve health-care costs by
prescribing the cheaper medicine that is nearly as good? … What can an individual
doctor do to fix health-care costs? … [One way is] by deploying powerful tools that are
newly at our disposal – genetics, epidemiology, computational analysis, biochemistry. …
The big hope, yet unfulfilled, is that such treatment will ultimately increase value and
decrease overall cost. It’s the sort of medicine that might treat medicine’s cost crisis.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil, on the cost-value conundrum in American health care, in The New York Times
Are Cancer Centers “Selling Out” With Clinical
Trials Advertising?
ASH
@ASH_hematology
Thank you to all of the members of our Committee
on Practice who joined us on Capitol Hill today to
#Fight4Hematology and advocate for tools that will help
us #ConquerSCD!
Ade Adamson, MD
@AdeAdamson
I bet MOST 4th year medical students could not correctly
define all of the following terms:
1) health-care premium
2) health-plan deductible
3) out-of-pocket maximum
4) co-insurance
They could probably tell you the genetic mutation in Marfan
syndrome though. #meded #priorities
Gavin Preston, MD
@GavinPrestonMD
Second law of #medicine=No one cares how much you
know, until they know how much you care. #Ethics
Craig Hofmeister, MD, MPH
@EagleMyeloma
7 a.m. meeting with a focus on burnout.
Many clinicians
logged into EHR approving orders, adding attestations...
“One of the ways [cancer treatment centers] compete for patients is by offering a menu
of clinical-trial options and suggesting that participating in such trials gives patients an
edge in their care. … The most insidious aspect of these ads stems from the implication
that patients who get access to drugs in trials have an advantage over patients who
do not. If that was true, there would be no point in running clinical trials. … Local
ethics committees work hard to help patients who are navigating a labyrinth of fear,
uncertainty, and hype to see clinical trials for what they are: Medical experiments that
play an essential role in generating evidence for the care of future patients. … Patients
who offer their bodies to help discover tomorrow’s treatments deserve messages that
are truthful, balanced, and respectful of their role in advancing science, not the hype for
clinical trials that is becoming increasingly common.”
—Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD, and Alex John London, PhD, on the ethics of
clinical-trials advertising in STAT News
Why We May Lose
Generic Drugs
Generic drugs account for more than 90 percent of U.S.
prescriptions, but manufacturers are worried that slim
profit margins will force them to stop making certain
medications. In Bloomberg Businessweek, pharma
experts describe the coming of the “generic apocalypse.”
“We’re one of the companies that continues to make
antibiotics, and we’ve asked ourselves for years why we
continue to still make them.”
—Brendan O’Grady, executive vice president of
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in North America
Follow ASH and ASH Clinical News on:
@ASH_Hematology, @BloodJournal,
@BloodAdvances, and @ASHClinicalNews
Facebook.com/AmericanSocietyofHematology
@ASH_Hematology
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ASH Clinical News
“We have supported the [drug-buying] consortiums to
the point where we’re discontinuing products and shut-
ting facilities. … We are not in the position to provide
more price reductions. Already this year, [we have] had
requests for six different products. ‘Can you make A, B,
C?’ The answer is no. And even if we could, pricing is still
so low we wouldn’t be able to bring back a product.”
—Paul Campanelli, president and chief executive officer of
Endo Pharmaceuticals
“For many complex reasons, generic drug manufacturers
are being challenged to become more efficient and institute
more nimble supply chains. The notion that group-purchasing
organizations are somehow to blame for generic drugmakers’
woes is a red herring.”
—Janine Burkett, RPh, MBA, president of Econdisc and vice
president and chief drug sourcing officer at Express Scripts
“We constantly talk about the portfolio of the business erod-
ing in price. And yet we’re getting these new bills about being
price gougers. … The question becomes ultimately how many
[generic manufacturers] are going to exit [the market], and
where will the market find a new equilibrium?”
—Robert Matsuk, president of Glenmark Pharmaceuticals in
North America
June 2018