Peter Pitts is partner/director of global health at Porter Novelli, a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, and a former FDA associate commissioner.
He’s the CMS official whose report on Part D costs were “suppressed” during the debate over the Medicare Modernization Act. That was in 2003 — when he was a whistle-blowing darling of Congressional Democrats. That was then. This is now. Today Mr. Foster asserts that the new health care law says it will not slow […]
In his State of the Union address, the President implored Congress not to “walk away” from healthcare reform. With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, and growing skepticism among Americans, passage of a “comprehensive” healthcare bill is looking less and less likely every day. And for good reason. The House and Senate versions of healthcare reform […]
As we flip the calendar to a new year and a new decade, it’s time again for the DrugWorks.com Golden Clipboard Awards. Why a golden clipboard? Well, commenting on the current state of 21st-century bioinformatics, Dr. Janet Woodcock, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, quipped, “Today the […]
Now that Uncle Sam is in the automotive business, some members of Congress are beginning to behave like used car salesmen (my apologies to used car salesmen). Specifically, some of our elected representatives are trying to sell the American public on healthcare reform via the old bait-and-switch. The issue at hand is taxing employer-provided health […]
Picture a typical morning. If you’re like me, you head into the kitchen, pour yourself a cup of coffee, scan the newspaper, and take your vitamins and prescription drugs. Imagine if, after washing down those pills with your coffee, you were to cough out a rat. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. That’s the storyline in a […]
Yesterday, Wednesday, I woke up, shaved, and drove to work. My EZ Pass still worked. Barack Obama is our President-Elect. Please note the possessive — “our” — because he will shortly be the new President of the United States. The whole United States. Red states and blue states. He’s our president regardless of political affiliation […]
You’ve probably seen a lot of pink ribbons around lately. Maybe you’re even wearing one. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, after all. But which presidential candidate deserves to wear that pink ribbon? In other words, which of the two supports healthcare policies that are most likely to help in the fight against breast cancer? […]
Ah, the glorious patent — such a simple concept, and yet so utterly essential to a properly functioning society. In basements and R&D departments across the country, innovators are hatching newfangled gadgets, widgets, and services — products that will fuel economic growth and improve lives — because they are reasonably confident that a patent will […]
Prescription drugs cost too much! Or at least that’s what we hear, day-in and day-out, on television, in the news, and, of course, in Sicko. Some health-care activists have rallied around high drug costs to agitate for more government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry and more government involvement in health care. Hoping to stoke public […]
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to make it more difficult to invalidate a patent. Essentially, the court decided that “obvious” combinations of previous inventions do not warrant protection under U.S. patent law. The case before the high court was KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. The dispute was over a patent […]
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