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Showing posts from March, 2018

The Dander Riseth Ever Higher: Shulkin Case Emblematic of Dysfunction

What follows is numero sesto if memory serves in a series of what gets one's dander up in this era of dysfunctional health care. Of course it seems these days our news in Health Care Renewal is so often all about focal dysfunction mirroring much broader problems of governmental and societal dysfunction. It's in this context that I learned just now of the current VA Secretary's ouster while

How Do We Counter Health Care Disinformation Under a Disinformer-in-Chief?

"Don't worry, things could be worse.  And sure enough, things got worse." Disinformation in Medicine and Health Care Stealthy, deceptive systematic marketing, lobbying, and policy advocacy campaigns on behalf of big health care organizations, often pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, have long been a subject of Health Care Renewal.  A relatively recently revealed

And the Dander Keeps On Rising

This is número cinco in our series of attempts to shed some of this dander. But it keeps on rising. Here are two recent reports both relating to the life-on-the-ground of North American rank and file physicians, especially as that life increasingly revolves around data entry and digital madness over and above everything else. Are physicians suffering from acute, maybe by now chronic, PTSD? In

Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington

In "Trump Town," the Revolving Door Runneth Over: Yet More Ex-Lobbyists as Political Appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services

We have accumulated a remarkable number of stories of people transiting the revolving door from high-level positions in health care corporations to high-level positions in health care policy or regulation for the Trump administration.  These stories may not always appear in the most prominent places, but their accumulation suggests they should be of prominent importance. ProPublica's "

Quattro! More from the DOG Patch.

Some more offerings in our fourth effort in these pages to get rid of this damned dander. It's still up! Here in the DOG Patch, D is for Dander, and the dander, in spite of smatterings of good new lately, has still got itself up. Vive le Québec! Nodbody's taking sides in Canadian separatism, if it's still brewing north of the border. But a certain sense of fairness surely prevails, and we have

How Corporate Health Care Leaders Maintain Their Impunity: The Case of Purdue Pharma's Funding of the Washington Legal Foundation to Attempt to Weaken the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine

The ongoing epidemic of narcotic (opioid) abuse, and the resulting rise in the deaths due to overdoses, has focused attention on pharmaceutical companies' aggressive promotion of these drugs which minimized their substantial risk. A recent article in the Intercept showed how the leadership of one such company tried to insulate itself from responsibility for such actions even while such promotions