- What if the FTC truth-in-advertising law applied to Congress? CBO: The inflation Reduction Act will have a negligible effect on inflation.
- Nurses leaving the ER for Botox.
- Company wants a cell or two from you, so it can grow an embryo and harvest organs. HT: Tyler Ghoulish
- Since Democrats need every vote to pass their IRA bill, their new approach to Covid in Congress is: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
- The controversy over SSRIs has become political. But shouldn’t we all want to know what antidepressants mass shooters were on when they opened up on innocent victims?
Category: Single-Payer/Medicare-for-All
New Antibiotics Are Desperately Needed: Why Drug Makers Won’t Develop Them
Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are a growing. Worse yet, the pipeline of new antibiotic drugs in development are few and far between. It’s been several years since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new antibiotic. The FDA recently declined to approve two new applications for drugs to treat urinary tract infections (sulopenem and tebipenem). The agency wants more data on the efficacy compared to drugs currently on the market. It’s not likely to get better anytime soon.
Monday Links
- 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
- California is going to make its own insulin.
- Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
- Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off. “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
- Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
- David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
Big Pharma Blames Hospitals and PBMs for High Drug Prices
Adam Fein at Drug Channels pointed me to a June 2022 report from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) on the price of drugs. The report is full of tidbits on drug spending. For example, the report states that prescription drug spending represents only 14% of health care expenditures. It is true that drugs are the best value in health care (especially over-the-counter drugs but that was not in the report). While it is true that drugs tend to be a better value than, say hospitals, not all drugs are of equal value. (That too was not in the report.)