Thursday Shorts
April 18, 2024
Regular posts return tomorrow. For today, a few short notes about articles I’ve been reading that relate to past Employer Coverage notes.
Cardiologists with industry payments are more likely to use certain devices. JAMA, today. Dhruva, et al found that cardiologists that received industry payments were twice as likely to use a left ventricular assist device. The payments were very modest (median value just $164!). I wrote about the general issue of industry payments to physicians earlier this week.
Measles cases top 120. Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, U Minn, April 15. Measles cases are at 121, and there are 18 areas of the country reporting cases. My colleague Patricia Toro wrote about this in Employer Coverage in February.
Telehealth company pays fine over data sharing. StatNews reported this week that Cerebral, a telemedicine company that prescribed ADHD drugs, would pay a fine for its use of medical information for marketing purposes, a violation of HIPAA. I mentioned the issue of “pixels” that shared sensitive data with marketing companies in January, 2023. The Markup, a journalism site, has a tool, BlackLight, that shows what pixels are in any website.
Problems with insulin price caps. StatNews noted that the Senate Democrats have failed to bring bills to the floor to expand Medicare insulin price caps to the commercial market. Also, a company that announced a $35 out of pocket price cap for one of its products as of this January has announced that it will discontinue that product by the end of the year. Here’s a link to a post on research we published showing that many with diabetes spend more out of pocket on diabetes drugs other than insulin
Paying for drugs that don’t work. Bloomberg reports that Americans are paying billions for drugs that turn out not to work. I wrote about pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to give accelerated approval to drugs for rare diseases in July, 2023. The drug to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis discussed in that post, Relyvrio, was withdrawn from the market this month.
Tomorrow: Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders almost doubled from 2008-2020
Thanks for reading. You can find previous posts in the Employer Coverage archive
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Illustration by Dall-E