Featured scripthacker

The AMA Is Using Its Government-Granted Healthcare Data Monopoly to Power a Sketchy New Commercial Venture

By LEAH HOUSTON, MD (11)

Source: Health2047.com

Like many academic institutions and non-profits these days, the American Medical Association (AMA) decided not long ago to get into the innovation business, launching Health 2047, a new for-profit Silicon Valley-style venture innovation incubator.

One of the AMA’s first new ventures is Akiri, a blockchain-enabled data transmitting and sharing network built to efficiently transmit the data the AMA owns among patients, physicians, and health systems. According to a news brief filed at the time, Akiri’s data transmission network includes health information exchanges, and will allow the personal health records of patients to be transmitted. [1]

What most people don’t know is that Congress effectively granted the AMA a monopoly on healthcare data back in the sixties.

Continue reading

Jason Chung

The Strange Case of India’s National Coronary Stent Policy

BY ANISH KOKA, MD (1)

It is commonly believed that deliberate, careful price regulation by enlightened technocrats trumps the haphazard and chaotic regulation of prices imposed by the free market—especially when the market is subject to greed and corruption.

A most interesting case study challenging that belief comes courtesy of the largest Democracy in the world: India.

In 2017, an arm of the Indian Government, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) took action to control the price of coronary stents in India by capping their retail price. The problem that stimulated this action was their exorbitant price that made them unaffordable to many Indians.

The retail prices of US made drug-eluting stents ranged from Rs 80,000 – 150,000 (~$1000 – ~$2000), while the price of Indian made drug-eluting stents ranged from Rs 45,000 – 90,000 (~$600 – ~$1200). Considering that a good job for 90% of the Indian labor force pays about Rs 180,000 per year, these prices put most coronary stents out of the reach of a vast swath of the populace.

What regulators knew, however, was that the price point at which coronary stents were being imported into India was a fraction of the price being charged to Indians. The up-charge had everything to do with what happened after the stent was brought onto Indian soil: The Indian subsidiary of the US stent manufacturer would sell its product to a domestic distributor that would then employ all means necessary to ensure their stent was chosen by cardiologists to be implanted.

Pages: 1 2
scripthacker

A Disquisition on Medicare For All & Related Subjects

By MARGALIT GUR ARIE ( 3 )

Medicare for all Americans is on the table now. Think about it. The not-in-our-lifetime utopian vision of every progressive liberal, complete with dancing rainbows and unicorns, is now within reach. Alternatively, the socialized medicine Trojan Horse that will turn these United States into a toilet-paper free Venezuela is now before Congress. There are over half a dozen bills in Congress, introduced by serious people with serious intentions, proposing some version of government administered universal health insurance in America.

Whichever ideological camp you’re in, it is a profound disgrace that in America today many people cannot afford basic medical care, as profound a disgrace as having veterans sleeping on sidewalks, as profound a disgrace as having one in five children living in poverty, as profound a disgrace as having Americans going to bed hungry. This was not supposed to happen in our “shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”. It just wasn’t supposed to be this way in a country founded on the inalienable right to pursue happiness. Regardless of why it happened, whose fault it is, or how to “fix” it, America was not supposed to be this way. It just wasn’t.

Continue reading