During her ER visit, all [Pell] received was the ice pack and the bandage. That’s it. She wasn’t treated in any other way. Doctors made no diagnosis. And she made sure that no one touched her before she knew if they were in network or not.
Pell received a bill for $5,751.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
The Biggest Controversy in Pharma World: SSRIs
Scientists at University College London have conducted an umbrella review, evaluating pre-existing research, and concluded that there is little support for the idea that depression is related to abnormally low levels of serotonin.
Sahanika Ratnayake at Slate writes:
It’s true that the authors of the study are controversial figures, vocal to sometimes vituperative critics of the mental health status quo, leaving heated debates in their wake with each new publication. But the authors’ conclusion has been an open secret within mental health circles for at least a decade. The very public dispelling of this “serotonin model” has also removed a key plank in the widely believed but oversimplified myth of mental illness being caused by a “chemical imbalance.”
Pharmaceuticals Good; Price Controls Bad
We find that during the last 20 years, profits and sales by research-based pharmaceutical companies made up 1.0% and 7.5% of total health care spending, respectively. In addition, annual sales growth contributed – 4.5% to the annual growth in total health care spending, partly due to real declines in drug spending in some years when there were increases in real health care spending. We thereafter summarize the evidence base on the impact of biopharmaceutical innovation on overall health care spending, which has been addressed by a large literature on so called cost offsets of new drugs. We find that these studies report an average cost offset from medical innovation, or total cost decrease, of $151.94 per new drug. We estimate how much recently proposed US price controls on drugs in the US would raise health care spending and find that total health care spending would increase by $50.8 billion over a 20-year period.
Landmark Alzheimer’s Study May be Bogus
A landmark study published in 2006 implied amyloid beta in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients could be the cause of their disease. However, a new investigation is casting doubt on data used in the 2006 study.
In a lengthy investigation published in the journal Science, a researcher has expressed concerns that a prominent 2006 Alzheimer’s disease study may have falsified images.