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Should Patients Get a Say in Deciding Whether a Drug Is Cost Effective?

August 2, 2019

A watchdog group sets aside emotions to assess drugs’ value. Patients say their lives are more than a number

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Should Patients Get a Say in Deciding Whether a Drug Is Cost Effective?

Friday, August 2nd, 2019

Health economists walk a precarious tightrope: Their analyses are quantitative and, presumably, emotion-free. But health care is intensely personal — and often, intensely emotional.

That tension between between quantitative analyses and lived experiences was on full display at a recent meeting of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit that tasks itself with determining what a drug is worth based on factors like how well it works and how much it helps patients.

ICER had set out to review evidence for three drugs that treat — but do not cure — Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare and fatal disease that causes affected people’s muscles to deteriorate over time. For them, the question is a basic — and, yes, quantifiable — one: Do the drugs improve the lives for these patients enough to justify the price tags, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year?

…continue reading ‘Should Patients Get a Say in Deciding Whether a Drug Is Cost Effective?’

Thumb image via STAT – Hadley Green for STAT

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STAT

Injecting Yourself with Dog Insulin? Just a Normal Day in America

August 1, 2019

Alan MacLeod writes, “The media invites us to be inspired by wholly unnecessary crises like UFC hopeful Jordan Williams, who uses dog insulin because he doesn’t have insurance”

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Injecting Yourself with Dog Insulin? Just a Normal Day in America

Thursday, August 1st, 2019

Sports media giant ESPN recently published an in-depth and supposedly inspirational feature on Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) hopeful Jordan Williams, who fought for a lucrative UFC pro contract, on 23 July. It described how the true fighter has persevered through difficulties, training hard and smart to rise to the top despite many setbacks, including his type 1 diabetes.

“I’ve been an athlete my whole life, even before I was diagnosed as a diabetic and now long after. I always try to go my hardest and always try to train and push myself to the limit,” Williams explains.

The article is a standard “triumph over adversity” piece until it casually notes in the 17th paragraph: “Williams doesn’t have medical insurance and cannot afford the treatment. So he buys insulin that’s sold for dogs at Walmart for $24.99 per bottle.”

…continue reading ‘Injecting Yourself with Dog Insulin? Just a Normal Day in America’

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by Joan Piazza

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The Guardian

NHS Scraps Plan to Sell DNA Tests to Healthy People

July 25, 2019

Amid concerns over two-tier health system, new scheme will read volunteers’ DNA for free

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NHS Scraps Plan to Sell DNA Tests to Healthy People

Thursday, July 25th, 2019

NHS plans to sell DNA sequencing to healthy people on condition that they share their results for medical research have been scrapped amid concerns it would create an inequitable two-tier health system.

Matt Hancock, who survived Boris Johnson’s cabinet makeover to keep his job as health secretary, announced the “genomic volunteers” plan in January, which included a paid-for option that would be offered to healthy people in England to boost medical knowledge and uncover new treatments.

But in a government green paper on preventing ill health that was quietly released on Monday evening, the plans have been dropped in favour of a new scheme to recruit 5 million healthy volunteers who will have their DNA read for free. Details of how people will sign up for the scheme have not yet been determined.

…continue reading ‘NHS Scraps Plan to Sell DNA Tests to Healthy People’

Image: U.S. Air Force photo by Kemberly Groue

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The Guardian

Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America

July 22, 2019

Forced off their parents’ insurance and faced with high insulin prices, young adults dangerously ration, stockpile, and turn to the black market for the medication they need to stay alive

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Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America

Monday, July 22nd, 2019

On the day Jathan Laverty turned 26, he was working at a Columbus, Ohio, coffee shop and freelancing as a corporate event technician, hoping to get a foot in the door of the event planning industry. This birthday turned that search for a full-time job into something urgent.

Laverty has Type 1 diabetes, and as of that day in 2017, he was no longer eligible for coverage under his parents’ health insurance. He found himself needing medication to live that he could not afford.

“It’s a human necessity for me,” Laverty, now 28, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s my life or death every time I do or don’t take insulin.”

…continue reading ‘Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America’

Thumb image via Buzzfeed news – Courtesy Jathan Laverty

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Buzzfeed News

The Four Ordinary People Who Took On Big Pharma

July 22, 2019

They tried to warn us about the dangers of OxyContin. Almost two decades later, we’re finally listening

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The Four Ordinary People Who Took On Big Pharma

Monday, July 22nd, 2019

ROANOKE, Va. — In the beginning, there were just four: the Godfather from Philly, the Army sergeant from Georgia, the professor from California and the feisty mom from Florida.

It was the early 2000s, and they usually talked over old-school computer message boards. Occasionally they gathered in person, carrying posters of their children and middle-aged spouses — all dead from OxyContin overdoses.

Today we know just how dangerous this drug is. Purdue Pharma, the company that made OxyContin, the first extended-release opioid to be widely prescribed, may finally be held to account. Some 200,000 people have died from overdosing on prescription opioids, and around 2,000 lawsuits attempting to make opioid makers and distributors pay for the damage unleashed by careless overprescribing are wending their way through the courts. But experts predict it will take more than $100 billion to turn the crisis around, and it’s hard to feel optimistic when you know the story of how long and hard these four labored in obscurity before anyone listened to them.

…continue reading ‘The Four Ordinary People Who Took On Big Pharma’

Thumb image via NYT: Charlotte Kesl for The New York Times

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NY Times

A ‘No-Brainer’?

July 17, 2019

Calls grow for Medicare to cover anti-rejection drugs

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A ‘No-Brainer’?

Wednesday, July 17th, 2019

On Wednesday, Alexis Conell will mark seven years since she received the kidney transplant that saved her life, but the 53-year-old Chicago woman isn’t exactly celebrating.

Although the federal government paid most of the costs for her 2012 transplant, a long-standing Medicare policy halted coverage three years later for the drugs that keep her body from rejecting the organ.

So when Conell lost her job suddenly last September, she also lost her health insurance — and her ability to afford the 16 daily medications she needs to survive.

“I was terrified,” she said. “All you’re thinking is, ‘I don’t want to lose my kidney.’”

…continue reading “A ‘No-Brainer’?”

Image via KHN/Taylor Glascock

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KHN

The Promise and Perils of Cellular Therapies

July 16, 2019

New “living drugs”—made from a patient’s own cells—can cure once incurable cancers. But can we afford them?

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The Promise and Perils of Cellular Therapies

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

It matters that the first patients were identical twins. Nancy and Barbara Lowry were six years old, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with eyebrow-skimming bangs. Sometime in the spring of 1960, Nancy fell ill. Her blood counts began to fall; her pediatricians noted that she was anemic. A biopsy revealed that she had a condition called aplastic anemia, a form of bone-marrow failure.

The marrow produces blood cells, which need regular replenishing, and Nancy’s was rapidly shutting down. The origins of this illness are often mysterious, but in its typical form the spaces where young blood cells are supposed to be formed gradually fill up with globules of white fat. Barbara, just as mysteriously, was completely healthy.

The Lowrys lived in Tacoma, a leafy, rain-slicked city near Seattle. At Seattle’s University of Washington hospital, where Nancy was being treated, the doctors had no clue what to do next. So they called a physician-scientist named E. Donnall Thomas, at the hospital in Cooperstown, New York, asking for help.

…continue reading ‘The Promise and Perils of Cellular Therapies’

Thumb image via The New Yorker

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The New Yorker

Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face

July 15, 2019

Dozens of databases of people’s faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology

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Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face

Monday, July 15th, 2019

The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million.

The face compilations are being driven by the race to create leading-edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using “neural networks,” which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition.

Tech giants like Facebook and Google have most likely amassed the largest face data sets, which they do not distribute, according to research papers. But other companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence, according to academics, activists and public papers.

…continue reading ‘Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face’

thumb image via NYT – Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License, via Megapixels

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New York Times

Page 3 of 68«1 234 5...10 20 30...»Last »

Should Patients Get a Say in Deciding Whether a Drug Is Cost Effective?

Should Patients Get a Say in Deciding Whether a Drug Is Cost Effective?

Injecting Yourself with Dog Insulin? Just a Normal Day in America

Injecting Yourself with Dog Insulin? Just a Normal Day in America

NHS Scraps Plan to Sell DNA Tests to Healthy People

NHS Scraps Plan to Sell DNA Tests to Healthy People

Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America

Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America

The Four Ordinary People Who Took On Big Pharma

The Four Ordinary People Who Took On Big Pharma

A ‘No-Brainer’?

A ‘No-Brainer’?

The Promise and Perils of Cellular Therapies

The Promise and Perils of Cellular Therapies

Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face

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