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After critics called President Trump’s long-awaited plan to rein in Big Pharma’s rapacious prices disappointing, his administration launched a much-tried tactic against the industry: “naming and shaming.” The federal Food and Drug Administration issued a list of drug makers and the complaints against them about their expensive “shenanigans,” their efforts to undercut potentially cost-cutting competition by stalling the creation of generic counterpart medications.

As the New York Times reported, Uncle Sam and Big Pharma have battled for some time over generics, which FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has made a new cost-controlling priority. These drug alternatives, which don’t carry patent protections and pricey branding, marketing, and advertising, are supposed to be cheaper and equally safe and effective for patients.

But their makers need large batches of Big Pharma samples to work with to develop generics  ─ and more than three dozen major firms like Johnson & Johnson’s Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Celgene, Gilead Life Sciences, Novartis, Pfizer, and Valeant have balked at providing requested products.

An ugly truth about malpractice lawsuits is that some of the most indefensible violations of patient safety are covered up by hospitals, clinics and doctors with the complicity of the lawyers representing the injured patients.  This happens when settlements are entered into that require the patient to keep confidential everything that happened, and sometimes to even pretend it never happened.

USA Today has a big takeout today that describes a particularly egregious example: the prestigious Cleveland Clinic covered up a rape allegation against one of its surgeons by settling the patient’s claim and requiring the patient to sign a settlement document promising to remain silent about the episode. Eventually the surgeon resigned quietly and moved onto another health care institution, which of course knew nothing about the allegations until informed recently by the newspaper.

Everybody is familiar by now with how secret settlements have allowed sex abusers in the entertainment and media world – Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the gallery of shame – to buy off their accusers and go onto perpetrate harms against others.

You and the kids may decide to splurge a little, devouring some Halloween candy. (Know that just a few of these morsels pack a load of unhealthy excess calories and sugar — see the great infographic from Consumer Reports.)

So here’s the penitent-tradeoff: While muching on a choice few bites of candy, please also take the time to sign up for your 2018 health insurance. Many of you will get tons of information from your employer because you get coverage at work.

If you qualify for insurance on exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the big news is, yes, the program still exists. It can benefit many, but they need to review their options and get aboard during the program’s Nov. 1-Dec. 15 open enrollment period. The Trump Administration has made some of this process more challenging, decreasing the support for public outreach and shortening the qualifying time.

Republican leaders just can’t seem to help themselves. As they flounder in their assault on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, they have moved from the inaccurate and counter-factual, beyond partisan buzzwords and talking points, and into a territory where they keep uncorking one howler after another about American health care and the ACA.

• President Trump observed of policy making on the $3-trillion sector that comprises 17.5 percent of the American GDP: “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Two health care experts just put out a list of seven questions that Congress needs to answer about its replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The list is simple and useful for all of us in any contacts we have with lawmakers. Here it is:

For more details about what the possible answers might be, read the op-ed in the New York Times that this list came from, by Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago and Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee University.

And if any readers of this blog feel moved to pick up the phone and call your Representative or Senator, here’s a website that has a dedicated phone line that will patch you through to the right member of Congress representing you.

Or just call: 866-426-2631.

More than 3,600 hospitals across the United States have taken a star turn. Many aren’t happy about it, and the same may be true for some members of Congress. Whether patients benefit is still murky. But federal officials, who have been planning a new and expanded hospital rating system for a long time now, have gone ahead with it because they say it will clarify for consumers some critical issues of safety, quality, and cost in health care.

Uncle Sam took 64 ratings it already publishes on its Hospital Compare website on measures like emergency room wait times and hospital acquired infection rates, and, summarized these into overall scores for institutions large and small. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, grouped them, weighted them, and, ultimately, converted the data into stars, from a low of one to a high of five.

Federal officials say this rating system, more common with restaurants and on review apps for the young, like Yelp, gives patient-consumers a fast, easy, clear, convenient way to start to deal with the complex, difficult issue of whether a hospital’s any good or not. The hospitals disagree, strongly, and some members of Congress have sided with them, and against the star ratings.

We wrote yesterday about contamination at the pharmacy of the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda. Other big hospitals, judging by media reports, also may need to look at their pharmacy operations, especially when they compound ingredients together into custom drugs for patients.

A major hospital in a San Diego, Calif., suburb may have exposed more than 7,300 of its patients to infection risk due to contaminated medications served up in a pharmacy compounding lab. State officials fined Paradise Valley Hospital $17,500 not only for sanitary violations found in inspections but also because a hospital executive with oversight over the compounding lab was found to have falsified records; no patients came down with infections at the hospital due to the lab woes, otherwise the hospital could have been fined up to $75,000, state officials said.

And in Seattle, the flagship University of Washington Hospital between May 2014 and October 2015 produced medications for  surgical IVs, cancer care chemotherapy, and even simple injectable steroids for joint pain in pharmacies so dirty that they failed that state’s health department inspections, a TV station has reported.