Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix / NY Times
An excellent piece discusses how turning over aspects of healthcare to private industry led to greater costs without accompanying benefits, and compares the US with other first world countries.
Similar Posts
Clinical trial data for all drugs in current use / BMJ
Re: Clinical trial data for all drugs in current use 31 October 2012 Dr. Godlee’s editorial (BMJ 2012; 345 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e7304) underscores the importance of the GlaxoSmithKline decision to allow access to anonymized patient level data from its clinical trials. Meta-analysts can now work more efficiently in summarizing knowledge relating to the benefits and risks of…
Overcounting Covid hospitalizations: Stanford review finds 45% of 117 pediatric “Covid hospitalizations” were not hospitalized for Covid
Four things we know of probably helped drive up the number of hospitalizations coded as due to Covid-19. One was the payment of considerably more funds by Medicare for a hospitalization coded with a Covid DRG than for a comparable illness. Two was an extra federal payment to hospitals that met a certain threshold of…
Seymour Hersh: Obama Administration Distorted the Facts Surrounding Syrian Chemical Weapons
Hersh has written an in-depth piece on the intelligence about Syria’s chemical weapons attack in the London Review of Books, suggesting parallels with the justifications created for the war on Iraq in 2003. His final two paragraphs note that Al-Nusra rebels may be the only group left with access to sarin in Syria soon: The…
HPV Vaccine: only about 30% of young women who start the series complete it
Two articles, each reporting on a different study, found that uptake of subsequent doses of HPV vaccine, after the first, was poor. Neither entertained the possibility that side effects might have something to do with this. Maybe side effects had nothing to do with it. But since vaccine effectiveness depends on 3 repeated doses, it…
“What, in Fact, Is the Evidence That Vaccinating Healthcare Workers against Seasonal Influenza Protects Their Patients? A Critical Review” / Int’l J Family Medicine
Israeli doctor Zvi Howard Abramson reviewed the literature on healthcare worker flu vaccinations in 2012 and found the evidence to support vaccinations wanting. Read the whole article or his key points: (i)There are no studies showing that healthcare workers are at increased risk of influenza and its complications or that the vaccine is more effective…
WaPo editorial on the virus origin investigation, 2/5/2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavirus-origins-mystery-china/ WHAT IS China trying to hide about the origins of the pandemic — and why? In Wuhan, a World Health Organization team has launched its investigation into the origins of the virus that has infected 105 million people worldwide and cost 2.2 million lives over the past year. The terms of reference for the…