Yesterday's news on Merck's prolific use of ghostwriters to produce medical-research articles yielded lots of coverage, much of it highly critical. Still, there was a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in the media, which couldn't seem to decide if Merck's actions amounted to venial or mortal sins. ...
Last week, Pfizer held its promised "media roundtable" to address a rising chorus of concern about its anti-smoking drug Chantix. Reports from Pharmalot and the WSJ Health Blog suggest that Pfizer and its spokespeople offered exactly the kind of circle-the-wagons defense I'd predicted. From the WSJ blog, Pfizer's main talking...
A new wrinkle in the debate over retail health clinics is emerging in Massachusetts, where drugstore giant Walgreens is running into political opposition over its plans to open a Take Care clinic in one of its Boston stores. For-profit retail clinics typically offer basic care for minor...
Good deeds rarely go unpunished in the field of healthcare reform. And punishment is exactly what's befallen a Medicare demonstration project intended to save money by creating a competitive-bidding system for diagnostic laboratory tests. A federal judge yesterday issued a preliminary junction that stalls the effort,...
Private auditors hired by Medicare have been scouring hospital and doctor records for the last few years in search of overbilling, waste and fraud. Paid on a contingency basis, which gives them a natural incentive to be aggressive, such "recovery audit contractors" identified more than $1 billion in improper Medicare...
A quick roundup of recent developments in Roche's dramatic $44 billion bid takeover bid for Genentech: Genentech established a committee of three "independent" directors to evaluate the Roche bid. The especially odd thing here is that one of them is Genentech's co-founder Herbert Boyer. I'm sure Boyer...
Lots of people are down on the prospects for many big U.S. health plans, which have been battered by declining enrollment, bad claims management, poor investment performance, and continued run-ins with state insurance regulators. But uber-investor Warren Buffett sees a silver lining somewhere in all that bad news. ...
The University of Chicago Medical Center, whose South Side location in that city exposes it to what administrators undoubtedly feel are more than their share of indigent and uninsured patients, aims to move upscale by invading the turf of its much better positioned rival Northwestern Memorial Hospital. ...
An old health-insurance scandal just keeps on giving at UnitedHealth, which today settled a shareholder lawsuit over the way it backdated stock options for its former CEO Bill McGuire and other execs. The insurer will pay $895 million to resolve claims by Calpers, the giant California public-pension fund, that the...
So Pfizer apparently won't be playing the spoiler in the Daiichi-Ranbaxy merger after all. Instead, CEO Jeff Kindler cut a deal with the Indian generics maker that will delay the introduction of generic Lipitor by about 20 months. Ranbaxy is now spared the cost and uncertainty involved...
Moody's has never been the most cheerful of outfits -- somehow its name seems particularly fitting -- and its latest missive to the drug industry is perfectly in keeping with its dour, green-eyeshade image. In short, pharmaceutical makers need to brace themselves, because their credit problems are only going to...
When a cash-cow drug like Pfizer's smoking-cessation treatment Chantix comes under fire for alleged side effects, the pharma response always seems to be the same -- circle the wagons and deny, deny, deny. The only problem? Making like the tobacco industry in its heydey doesn't seem to...
Electronic medical records could let patients travel freely to doctors of their choice, improve their odds of getting the right care in emergencies and reduce medical errors, duplicated tests and unnecessary prescriptions. They're also the standard in most industrialized nations as well as U.S. healthcare systems such as the Cleveland...
I missed the meeting late last month of the Healthcare Financial Management Association's Annual National Institute HFCA ANI to the initiated. Fortunately, however, the invaluable Anne Zieger of Fierce HealthFinance did make it, and reported on new challenges in managing hospital and healthcare-system finances from Las Vegas: ...
The saga over Vytorin, the expensive cholesterol pill that may be no better than older, cheaper "statin" drugs, has come to a familiar pass: The manufacturer backlash. Merck and Schering-Plough, the makers of Vytorin, saw their stocks crushed the day after cardiologists trashed the multi-billion-dollar drug at...
The saga over Vytorin, the expensive cholesterol pill that may be no better than older, cheaper "statin" drugs, has come to a familiar pass: The manufacturer backlash. Merck and Schering-Plough, the makers of Vytorin, saw their stocks crushed the day after cardiologists trashed the multi-billion-dollar drug at...
The Food and Drug Administration rejected Genzyme's request to sell a version of its drug Myozyme made in a new factory, a decision some journalists and bloggers insist on casting as a black mark against the very notion of generic biotech drugs. There's just one problem: These...
The saga of Avastin and Lucentis -- two Genentech drugs used to treat a blinding condition called age-related macular degeneration, even though one is about 50 times cheaper than the other -- is one of those stories that just gets better the longer it goes on. A...
As an example of how not to handle a corporate crisis, it's hard to beat the growing scandal over Vytorin. That's the blockbuster anti-cholesterol drug whose clinical-trial data Merck and Schering-Plough sat on for a year or two after it showed that Vytorin was apparently no better than a...
Some once-friendly ghosts may be getting Merck in trouble all over again. The ethereal beings in question are ghostwriters -- the nameless, faceless freelancers paid by drug companies to draft up medical review papers, usually well before they're even seen by the academic researchers who will eventually...
