In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”
That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.
Category: News and Events
Indiana Bill Would Allow Associate Physicians in Underserved Areas Work
The state of Indiana has a bill before the Legislature (SB 400) that would allow medical graduates who have not matched to a residency to practice under licensed physicians. This is important because more than 10,000 medical graduates fail to match to a residency program each year. Many of those will try again the following year but many will ultimately never complete a residency program. In most states medical graduates who never complete a residency will never have an opportunity to care for patients.
Would You See an AI Doctor?
The term artificial intelligence (AI) has been in use for many years. Indeed, it includes many names, such as AI, neural networks, machine learning and a few other buzzwords. The preceding linked article from IBM tries to explain the meaning of all these terms. A few years ago, IBM made headlines as the developer of Watson, which famously competed on the game show Jeopardy, beating Ken Jennings. There is a new AI interface on the Internet that anyone can try out called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language-based AI chatbot that can do many things humans can do, including correcting computer code, writing college entrance essays and a host of other things.
Amazon Wants to be Your Primary Care Provider
What living man or woman has done more to make your life better than any other person? This is probably not something you have thought about. Most people would likely say their parents, although my parents are no longer living. I’ve thought about this question and I have a definitive answer: Jeff Bezos. Yes, Jeff Bezos. An Amazon truck stops at my house on a daily basis dropping off purchases, sometimes multiple items per day. In the early 1990s who would have thought that in the future you could go to a website and choose among 353 million products, most of which are priced lower than you can find locally. Furthermore, the prices elsewhere are lower than they otherwise would be because of the competition created by Amazon. In addition, these products are delivered to your doorstep, sometimes only a day or two after you ordered them.