Wednesday I directed you to an article in the Health section of Consumer Reports’ (CR) web site. The article I found on the CR Internet site Health page is titled 10 medical 'gotchas'. The article the link took you to is titled Overview. As I pointed out, there are a number of other articles you could read. One is titled New drugs, big dollars. This article is about the Pharmaceutical industry. The writer calls them Drugmakers. The Pharmaceutical industry has produced drugs that significantly improve our lives and in fact I would die in a few days if I stopped taking one of the drugs produced by a Drugmaker. I believe they are a blessing but I also believe there are abuses in the industry. Excising those abuses is one of the many challenges we need to address to lower the cost of health care.
One of my Son-In-Laws works for a Pharmaceutical company so I feel very sensitive about this subject but it can’t be ignored. I’m not suggesting that we should restrict Pharmaceutical companies from marketing to their customers or making a profit but I believe that the relationship between the health care industry and the Pharmaceutical industry needs to be scrutinized. There’s another article on the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) web site titled Doctors and Drug Companies — Scrutinizing Influential Relationships by Eric G. Campbell, Ph.D. Click on the title to read the article. The article talks about the efforts to require manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices to disclose how much money they give to doctors. The money can be in the form of dinners, trips, or consulting fees.
One of my Son-In-Laws works for a Pharmaceutical company so I feel very sensitive about this subject but it can’t be ignored. I’m not suggesting that we should restrict Pharmaceutical companies from marketing to their customers or making a profit but I believe that the relationship between the health care industry and the Pharmaceutical industry needs to be scrutinized. There’s another article on the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) web site titled Doctors and Drug Companies — Scrutinizing Influential Relationships by Eric G. Campbell, Ph.D. Click on the title to read the article. The article talks about the efforts to require manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices to disclose how much money they give to doctors. The money can be in the form of dinners, trips, or consulting fees.
Soon I’ll be posting an overview of another article on the NEJM web site. It’s a great article titled The Challenge of Rising Health Care Costs — A View from the Congressional Budget Office written by Peter R. Orszag, Ph.D., and Philip Ellis, Ph.D. Dr. Orszag is the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Dr. Ellis is a senior analyst at the CBO. The CBO is a nonpartisan agency that provides budgetary and economic analyses to Congress. You have to subscribe to the NEJM magazine to read the article so I can't link you to the article.
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