Minnesota Connect

In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported:

GM’s announcement Tuesday that it would cease medical coverage for its salaried retirees age 65 and above signals that a new era of ever-shrinking benefits has arrived. Beginning in January, even former employees who are already in retirement will lose their benefits, which most of the company’s retirees use to supplement gaps in their traditional Medicare coverage. The auto maker will boost monthly pension payouts to help offset the cuts. The company’s unionized workers aren’t affected by the cut to retiree health benefits.

GM isn’t the first company to do this, but its heft and influence could help usher in further cutbacks at other companies. …

At this point, employees and retirees “have to feel lucky if they still have retiree [health-care] benefits, and have to start planning for when they won’t,” says Rick McGill, head of retiree medical consulting for employee-benefits firm Hewitt Associates. He says such benefits are “a dying breed.”

The Mental Gymnastics blog last week posted a piece on drug company payments to Vermont doctors. Excerpts:

“Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell released a report on pharmaceutical marketing efforts in Vermont on July 8, 2008. See the report here. Media has been reporting the aggregate amounts that psychiatrists earned the most money from these payments. Eleven psychiatrists received roughly 20 % of these funds. However, the second largest aggregate amount went to cardiologists. Two cardiologists shared payouts of $312,898, or an average of $156,440 each, no small potatoes.

An interesting finding is the medications that were promoted. The top ten medications promoted were the following:

1. Strattera (ADHD)
2. Metadate CD (ADHD)
3. Januvia (Type 2 Diabetes)
4. Lexapro (Depression)
5. Cymbalta (Depression)
6. Lantus (Diabetes)
7. Seroquel (Bi-Polar Disorder and Schizophrenia)
8. Namenda (Alzheimer’s)
9. Vytorin/Zetia (Cholesterol)
10. Benicar (Hypertension)”

The annual “best hospitals” edition of US News & World Report always gets people talking.

This year’s edition certainly riled fellow UMN blogger Bill Gleason, AKA Mr. Bonzo, AKA The Whining Dinosaur, who blogs about his concerns.

AP reports:

Dr. Brian Hurley, president of the American Medical Student Association, said the new rules are an improvement but they don’t go far enough. He said gifts given to doctors as educational materials or occasional meals are still gifts. “Aggressive” marketing practices have made drug companies a lot of money, he said, and they have little incentive to stop those tactics.

“Educational gifts or educational programming that pharma’s member companies put together are marketing in disguise,” he said.

The Boston Globe reports:

The Prescription Project, a Boston-based national coalition of groups that monitors pharmaceutical marketing, released a statement noting that promotional spending by the pharmaceutical industry has increased since PhRMA adopted its first guidelines on gifts in 2002. It also said that a report released this week in Vermont, one of the few states that requires disclosure of marketing payments to doctors, showed an overall 33 percent increase in pharmaceutical payments in the last year.

The newspaper, The Australian, reports:

“THE makers of an anti-impotence treatment have been fined $60,000 for a publicity initiative that the industry’s self-regulating complaints body found breached the ban on promoting drugs direct to the public.

Eli Lilly, the maker of the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis, was also found by Medicines Australia’s Code of Conduct Committee to have issued a product-specific media statement in April this year.

The complaint was lodged over a press release issued by Eli Lilly in April, which was timed to coincide with the release of a new version of the drug called Cialis Once-a-Day.

The press release, headlined “New research reveals scheduled sex a turn-off”, reported the results of a national Galaxy poll — commissioned by Eli Lilly — which purported to show that 74 per cent of Australian men said “spontaneity … is an important part of sex”. The poll also claimed that more than half of men aged 45 to 54 “admit … that their ability to have sex on impulse has declined drastically or noticeably” since they turned 30.