[Reuters] – The most commonly used tool for detecting prostate cancer, routine PSA screening, has become “a hugely expensive public health disaster,” its discoverer said on Wednesday.
Dr. Richard Ablin of the University of Arizona joined the ongoing debate over the blood test, saying the screening procedure is too costly and ineffective.  “I never dreamed that [...]

[NEJM] Early in 2009, members of major health care–related industries such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical device makers, and hospitals all agreed to forgo some future profits to show support for the Obama administration’s health care reform efforts. Skeptics have questioned the value of these promises, regarding at least some of them as more [...]

“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]

[WSJ] Biotechnology companies, in a sign of the industry’s maturity, are increasingly coming under the microscope of shareholder activists, who want the sector to act more like traditional businesses.
In recent years, well-known activists like Carl Icahn and Ralph Whitworth have questioned whether larger biotechs, which tend to have good cash flow and diminished competition, are [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[medscape] As healthcare reform legislation grinds its way through Congress, 2 articles published online January 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) advocate for one of its touchiest provisions — comparative-effectiveness research (CER).
In theory, CER sounds like a calm, academic subject: evaluate different treatment options for a given illness — drug A vs [...]

[Hastings Center] All of the health care reform proposals in Congress promise to substantially increase the number of people who get their insurance from sources other than an employer. This shift opens the door to an increase in civil litigation because existing federal laws, specifically the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), protect the employer-sponsored [...]

Buried in the giant health care bills in Congress is a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Silicon Valley’s biotechnology and venture capital industries, sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat.  The provision would grant “biologic” drugs, a new class of drugs based on gene splicing and grown in living cells, 12 years of protection from [...]

Total health care expenses for Americans age 45 to 64 in 2006 ($370 billion) were about double the inflation-adjusted total for 1996 ($187 billion), according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ’s study covers all Americans age 45 to 64 other than those residing in nursing homes [...]

Step aside Jack Kevorkian, there’s a new “Dr. Death” in town.
Ten years after the notorious Michigan doctor was ultimately jailed for killing a patient — one of 130 he helped die through lethal injection — Philip Nitschke, a new renegade physician, is spreading the gospel of assisted suicide — and he’s coming to the United [...]