DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog

May 23, 2019

Generic drugs ensnared in price-fixing and shoddy manufacturing claims

With Big Pharma pressing the limits in promoting and pricing prescription medications, patients and their advocates long have hoped that generic drugs might be difference-makers on costs and practices. Those positive wishes, however, may be dying out by the day.

The attorneys general of dozens of states have sued major generic makers including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan, accusing them of conspiring to inflate generic drug prices by as much as 1,000%, the New York Times and other media organizations reported.

The makers’ price-fixing affected more than 100 generics, including “lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for A.D.H.D.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants,” the New York Times said.

May 21, 2019

Preventable hospital deaths’ terrible toll: at least 160,000 lives each year

by Patrick A. Malone

Although the fatalities have declined, preventable hospital deaths kill more than 160,000 Americans annually — four times as many lives as were lost to vehicle wrecks in 2017, more than twice the deaths attributable to opioids and drug overdoses that year, and more than the toll of stroke or Alzheimer’s disease.

The disturbing new report on hospital deaths comes from Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit founded by large employers and others concerned and focused on safety and quality in health care.

May 19, 2019

Terps draw new fire for staying mostly mum about a fatal viral outbreak

by Patrick A. Malone

Just as the nation grapples with the worst measles outbreak in a quarter century, the University of Maryland and public health officials are drawing fire for the way they handled the strange confluence of mold infections in dorms and the spread of an contagious virus among students on the College Park campus.

The university and its advisers tried to keep a lid on public information about the dual problems, leading students and parents to assail the school and to blame its sluggish response and silence for the death of an immune-compromised coed.

Her death late last year — following the fall heat-stroke fatality involving Jordan McNair, a 19-year-old football player — has renewed concerns that the university and its staff may lack the expertise, training, and sensitivity to protect vulnerable young people, the Washington Post reported as part of its investigation of the confused health scenario involving Olivia Shea Paregol.

May 17, 2019

For cancer patients in online support groups, another grief: illness fakers

by Patrick A. Malone

For all the benefits that the cyber world has bestowed on billions of users, it also has brought out trolls and bullies aplenty. It also potentially has created a new category of sick people. They use online forums to fake illnesses and gain sympathy and even money. There’s even a new term for it: Munchausen by internet.

To be sure, this is not yet a formal and widely accepted medical or psychiatric diagnosis but a description of a phenomenon that appears to be rising and has gotten media attention when exposed through the experiences of patients with serious and chronic illnesses who band together in online chat groups, writer Roisin Lanigan reported in the Atlantic magazine.

Lanigan says that patients with cancer, for example, find the cyber forums invaluable. They not only allow those with the disease to discuss their fears, emotions, and experiences, they can allow individuals to share tips and ideas on how to cope with situations that patients have never encountered and may be overwhelmed by.

May 16, 2019

Hospitals rip employer health plans with prices up to 3 times what Uncle Sam pays

by Patrick A. Malone

Big businesses, which beat on their employees to be more cost-conscious, efficient, and productive, may need to take a page out of their own books if they hope to better control the soaring health care costs that they’re also shoving off onto their workers.

That’s a key takeaway from new research by the independent, nonprofit RAND Corporation into prices paid in 25 states to 70 hospital systems by job-provided health insurers in 2017. They provide coverage for most Americans, more than 180 million of us, and RAND found that private employer-sponsored health plans paid hospitals on average twice or even three times as much as Uncle Sam did through the Medicare program for the same services at the same hospitals.

Hospitals bellyache about tight-fisted Medicare prices that Uncle Sam can negotiate due to big dollars and huge number of patients covered under its senior health care plan. Although hospitals call the government-negotiated prices too low and an unfair benchmark, they provide realistic insights into hospitals’ bottom-line charges in what is one of the biggest areas of Americans’ health care costs. As RAND researcher Christopher Whaley told Modern Healthcare, an industry-covering news organization:

May 14, 2019

Hundreds of moms die of preventable pregnancy-related complications

by Patrick A. Malone

Hundreds of mothers die of preventable pregnancy-related complications up to a year after delivering their babies, with black and native women experiencing notably high maternal morality risks.

The needless deaths of around 700 women nationwide each year due to cardiovascular conditions, infections, hemorrhages and other complications related to their pregnancies underscores the importance of improving maternal care, especially in increasing its access and quality, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported in a new study.

The Washington Post quoted Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, commenting on the agency data:

May 13, 2019

Wave of hip implant, opioid, talc suits tarnish a famed ‘family’ brand

by Patrick A. Malone

If consumers ever considered Johnson and Johnson just to be a family friendly health brand, the conglomerate’s legal challenges on three fronts—with problematic medical devices and drugs—may disabuse them of warm and fuzzy views.

As Bloomberg News Service reported, J&J will pay $1 billion to try to extricate itself from 95% of 6,000 lawsuits against it over defective metal-on-metal hip implants that not only caused patients great pain but also had to be surgically removed and replaced. The company still must resolve thousands of suits with patients who haven’t had replacement operations or whose implants were only partially metal.

J&J has battled over its Pinnacle implant from its DePuy unit for at least four years, losing sizable cases in Texas to patients who convinced judges and juries that the medical device maker had misled them about their artificial hips’ durability and risks, including assertions that it caused metal poisoning.

May 10, 2019

Modern medicine may be great at making money but not at making sense

by Patrick A. Malone

Spending’s askew when billions go for unproven surgical robots while lack of affordable care leads thousands of poor, black, and brown patients to need diabetic amputations

If U.S. health care leaders look ahead to 2020 and wonder why their sector of the economy will be one of the key concerns of presidential candidates and voters, they can only blame themselves for allowing the public to conclude that the industry’s big money and big profit drives have gone haywire.

How unbalanced have the nation’s health care priorities become that, on the one hand, surgeons and hospitals keep pushing to spend billions of dollars more for robotic surgeries that doctors themselves are doubting, while, on the other hand, researchers blame economic and racial disparities for playing a big role in requiring tens of thousands of patients — especially those who are black and brown and poor — to undergo diabetic amputations?

May 8, 2019

Big Pharma executives convicted of criminal racketeering with opioid sales

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as more felony charges may follow in drug epidemic, sleep med warning suggests pill popping stays too popular

Five top executives at a major drug maker have been convicted of criminal racketeering for their aggressive and deceptive marketing of a fentanyl spray in a case that prosecutors long have said may warn corporate leaders about their culpability in the nation’s opioid painkiller crisis.

Federal jurors deliberated for 15 days before finding guilty John Kapoor, founder and CEO of drug maker Insys (shown at right). Jurors also convicted Richard M. Simon, former Insys national director of sales; Sunrise Lee and Joseph A. Rowan, both former regional sales directors; and Michael J. Gurry, former vice president of managed markets. As the New York Times described the case against them:

May 7, 2019

Did FDA just let Big Tobacco put another burn on Americans’ health?

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators appear to be getting caught flat-footed yet again as Big Tobacco’s harms metastasize before their very eyes. The federal Food and Drug Administration has given a qualified go-ahead to Philip Morris International to sell a device that heats but does not burn tobacco, a process that appears to expose users to fewer harmful toxins.

Still, the iQOS gadget packs the same wallop of highly addictive nicotine as does a standard, tobacco-burning cigarette. And the FDA decided it would be regulated just as cigarettes are, thereby restricting its sales and marketing to young people.

Big Tobacco executives talked up iQOS (eye-kos) as yet another way for smokers of their proven and deadly burned tobacco cigarettes to get unhooked from them and to lessen their health harms.