Minnesota Connect

In an announcement that got surprisingly little news attention, the Commonwealth Fund released its National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008. Excerpts:

“The U.S. health system is on the wrong track. Overall, performance has not improved since the first National Scorecard was issued in 2006. Of greatest concern, access to health care has significantly declined. As of 2007, more than 75 million adults—42 percent of all adults ages 19 to 64—were either uninsured during the year or underinsured, up from 35 percent in 2003. At the same time, the U.S. failed to keep pace with gains in health outcomes achieved by the leading countries. The U.S. now ranks last out of 19 countries on a measure of mortality amenable to medical care, falling from 15th as other countries raised the bar on performance. Up to 101,000 fewer people would die prematurely if the U.S. could achieve leading, benchmark country rates. …

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, released this statement yesterday:

“It is a sad day when two superb Olympic athletes - whose performances earned a total of 14 gold medals combined - prostitute themselves for undisclosed amounts of money to help Allergan sell Botox. Instead of tens of millions of people watching the athletes’ performances in the past as they strived for their personal best, people will now be able to watch videos of doctors’ performances as they inject former swimmer Mark Spitz and former gymnast Nadia Comaneci with Botox.

This sends a terrible message to athletes, young or old, and to others that they should not accept the way they look as they age but, rather, should try to look their “personal best” by the Botox-enhanced pretense that they are younger than they really are.

Recently a physician friend brought the following to my attention. The same story, written by the same person, but appearing under two very different headlines.

Here’s the original New York Times headline:

The story stated at one point: “No one knows whether vaccinations had anything to do with the girls’ health problems, and the scientific significance of individual cases is always difficult to assess.”

But the Seattle Times picked up the NYT story and used this headline:

The Seattle headline gives the misleading impression that there’s a causal link between autism and vaccines. This is the kind of thing that gives headline writers a bad rep.

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.