Health Care Blog

JGrimes
Amid all the ink going to what the proposed health-care overhaul would do, we wanted to note an easy-to-overlook provision that it won’t do: eliminate many so-called pay-for-delay deals.
Those are the oft-criticized pacts under which branded drug makers give something to generic makers stall cheaper copycat versions coming on the market. The deals, […]

JGrimes
One of the most contentious front lines in the health-care cost wars is between hospitals and private insurers. That battle zone has gotten particularly hot in recent contract negotiations over reimbursement rates that hospitals are demanding from the insurers.
“We’ve never seen the kind of increases we’re seeing right now” from hospitals, Aetna President […]

JGrimes
This post by WSJ’s Laura Meckler also appears on the Washington Wire blog
The complex legislative maneuvering to pass health-care overhaul legislation has produced many questions and among them this: When can the White House declare victory?
If the House passes the Senate health bill on Sunday, as Democrats hope, and President Obama signs it […]

JGrimes
iVillage, one of the largest Web sites for women, is hoping to capitalize on a female penchant for seeking help online for health concerns or questions — especially those they are too embarrassed to discuss with anyone else.
iVillage launched a new health portal today, as part of a redesign of its site started […]

JGrimes
The Congressional Budget Office has finished its preliminary run-through of cost numbers for the latest — and perhaps final — version of the Democratic health plan before it comes to an expected vote as early as Sunday. Democrats liked what they saw and President Obama again delayed an Asia trip to […]

JGrimes
The world’s biggest generic drug maker is getting bigger with the announcement this morning that Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical had won the bidding against Pfizer for Germany’s Ratiopharm Group. The pricetag: $4.97 billlion.
A bidding contest had been dragging on for months for Ratiopharm, the world’s sixth largest generics maker. The deal is the biggest […]

Martin Trussell
Update from Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issuance of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) relating to the changes to HIPAA under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) passed as a part of ARRA. Health care organizations and health lawyers have been anxiously awaiting rules implementing and […]

JGrimes
Getting one drug through the FDA approval process is hard enough but getting the go-ahead for multiple medicines at once so they can be used together in so-called drug cocktails can be Herculean.
Now the agency is devising guidelines to speed up testing and approval of multidrug regimens for some of the world’s most […]

JGrimes
Ever since Harold Varmus’s January public letter stating he asked Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s board to start looking for his successor as president, people have been wondering what the Nobel laureate is going to do next.
Now there may be an answer: Varmus is expected to be nominated by the White House very soon […]

JGrimes
It’s getting close to April Fools Day but we’re told this is no joke: It seems that in a bid to cut down on the spread of infections, some British hospitals have taken to telling visitors and their medical staffs not to sit on the beds of patients.
“We are committed to doing all […]