pharmaceutical marketing

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas at ProPublica: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds Anna North in the New York Times: What Planned Parenthood Really Does Alison Young and Mark Nichols in USA TODAY: Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states David Roberts at Vox: How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce: Why We Must Build (“We can’t build our way out of the housing…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked: The excellent "Unequal Risk" series by the Center for Public Integrity's Jim Morris, Jamie Smith Hopkins, and Maryam Jameel ("Workers in America face risks from toxic exposures that would be considered unacceptable outside the job — and in many cases are perfectly legal.") Sarah Kliff at Vox: Do no harm ("There's an infection hospitals can nearly always prevent. Why don't they?") Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic: Letter to My Son ("Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body -- it is heritage.")…
The statistics describing America’s prescription drug abuse epidemic are startling, to say the least. Here are just a few statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: In 2009, prescription painkiller abuse was responsible for nearly half a million emergency department visits — a number that doubled in just five years. Of the more than 41,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2012, more than half were related to pharmaceuticals. In 2012, U.S. health care providers wrote enough painkiller prescriptions — 259 million — to provide every, single American adult with their own…
One of the less-noticed provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that pharmaceutical companies report to the Department of Health and Human Services the gifts and other payments they give to doctors and teaching hospitals -- and that HHS in turn make that information available to the public. (It's sometimes referred to as the "Physician Payment Sunshine Act," after legislation previously introduced in Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley.) Earlier this month, HHS released its final regulations to implement this provision. Beginning August 1, 2013, drug and device companies will…