Money-Driven Medicine on Bill Moyers Journal, PBS, Friday, August 28 --

 

   DVDs Available for Sale Online This Week

As regular readers know, Academy-award-winning documentary film producer Alex Gibney (Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, and Taxi to the Dark Side) has made a 90-minute documentary based on my book, Money-Driven Medicine. 

Moyers and the film’s director, Andy Fredericks, have cut the film down to 56 minutes so that Moyers can show a preview of excerpts from the film on  Bill  Moyers' Journal, Friday, August 28 (Check local listings for the exact time.) 

 For those who would like to see the whole 90-minute film, DVD’s will become available for sale this week (Thursday, August 20).  

Institutional Use & House Parties

Screen the DVD in community dialogs, classes, staff trainings, policy forums, 'brown bag' lunches and conferences.  Arrange "house parties" for friends and neighbors to discuss what ordinary citizens can do.   Institutions can buy the DVD by going to this site http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0225  or by calling 877-811-7495. DVDs will begin shipping this week, August 20.

For High Schools, Public Libraries, HBCUS and Qualifying Community Organizations, or anyone who wants to organize a brown bag lunch or “house party” the price is $49.95.

For Colleges, Corporations, and Gov’t Agencies, the price is $195.000

Individual Use

Individuals can rent a digital version of the film for home use at Newsreel.org/Amazon anytime after August 28 for $2.99

What People Are Saying About the Film

“Money-Driven Medicine is one of the strongest documentaries I have seen in years and could not be more timely.  The more people who see and talk about it, the more likely we are to get serious and true health care reform.”—Bill Moyers

“Few Americans appreciate how the health care system is gamed against physicians’ professional commitment to focus only on their patients’ best interests.  This outstanding film helps us all understand why reform is essential.”
- Elliott S. Fisher, MD, Director
Dartmouth Center for Health Policy Research
Principal Investigator, Dartmouth Atlas Project

(Disclosure—I’m not making money on the sale or rental of DVDs or any showings of the film. I just want to get the word out there—mm.)

 

 

Smoking Memo—or Bad Journalism?

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Yesterday, it seemed that the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim had a scoop. He reported that Huffington has obtained a memo that “confirms” that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly made a deal—the deal that I wrote about a few days ago in a post titled “What Was Billy Tauzin Thinking?”  According to the memo, the White House supposedly pledged to oppose any Congressional efforts to let Medicare negotiate for discounts on drugs, or to import drugs from Canada.

The memo in question turns out to be typed—and unsigned.  How does the reporter know that it is authentic?  “A knowledgeable health care lobbyist” told him so. According to the lobbyist the memo “was prepared by a person directly involved in the negotiations [and it] lists exactly what the White House gave up, and what it got in return.

Wait a minute. As PhRMA senior vice president Ken Johnson points out later in the story: “Anyone could have written it. Unless it comes from our board of directors, it's not worth the paper it's written on. . . .”

And who is the “knowledgeable lobbyist” who gave the memo to Huffington?  His name is not disclosed.

What we have then, is a story based on what one unnamed source says—and a typed memo that probably is untraceable.

Proof that American Physicians and Hospitals Can Lift Quality and Reduce Costs

The media has been paying too much attention to the lies about health care reform that the conservatives have been circulating. Perhaps this is understandable: they are Big Lies, colorful canards, horrifying rumors. But they are simply, totally wrong—made up out of whole cloth.

The job of the media is not to repeat rumors, but to present facts—so that the public can draw rational conclusions from empirical evidence. Today, the New York T.imes ran an Op-ed signed by Drs. Atul Gawande, Donald Berwick Elliott Fisher and Mark McClellan that does just that. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/opinion/13gawande.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp The four tell the story of ten U.S. communities that have managed to do what progressives claim health care reform can do: “change how care is delivered so that it is both less expensive and more effective.”  We don’t have to ration care. We don’t have to raise taxes for the middle-class or the upper-middle class. We may need modest tax hikes for the very wealthy to seed healthcare reform. But structural changes in our health care system can ultimately provide the savings needed to offer high quality, affordable care to everyone.

Last night, the Lehrer Report made the same point: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/health/healthreform/  We already know how to lift the quality of care while reducing costs.  This is not a theory dreamed up by ivory-tower academic physicians. It is a fact.

Can We Afford –and Do We Want—Every New Drug That Comes Down the Pike?

Business Week has just published an excellent piece exploring the pros and cons of Amgen’s new drug for osteoporosis.  It illustrates how drug-makers—and Wall Street investors—view new products.  It also demonstrates why government regulators should begin  taking a close look at pricey “me-too” drugs before committing billions of tax-payer dollars to pay for those new products.

ABC Nightline Interview aired Tuesday, Aug 11

As regular readers know, Academy-Award-winning documentary film-maker Alex Gibney (“Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room,”  “Taxi to the Dark Side”) has produced a 90-minute documentary based on my book, Money-Driven Medicine. Andrew Fredericks directed the film and I narrated it. 

ABC’s Nightline interviewed Alex and me about the film in a segment that aired August 11. Below, a link. (When you get to the website, scroll down and click on Nightline, August 11 on the left hand side of the screen)

Money-Driven Medicine producer Alex Gibney and author Maggie Mahar interviewed on Nightline's Tuesday, Aug 11 show.

Watch the interview here.

If you are interested in either buying or renting a DVD of the film, go to www.moneydrivenmedicine.org.

Should We Create A Market for Kidneys?

The seamy underside of the organ transplant business made the news recently when Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman, was arrested on accusations of trying to broker the purchase of a kidney for $160,000.

That the organ shortage is so great in this country that people are resorting to buying and selling kidneys is not a surprise; it probably happens more than we know. That’s because some 102,640 patients are waiting for an organ donation in the United States, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. More than 7,000 people died last year while they awaited kidneys, hearts, livers, lungs, and intestines.

The situation is particularly dire when it comes to kidneys. A sharp increase in diabetes rates in this country has fueled demand;  there are now more than 80,000 people on the official waiting list for a kidney transplant. Reports are that thousands of other patients--those that aren’t in bad enough condition to warrant a spot on the official list—could benefit from a kidney.

What Was Billy Tauzin Thinking?

Imagine that you are Billy Tauzin. You’re known as a brazen politician, with few scruples. You helped shepherd the Bush administration’s Medicare bill through Congress—legislation that included a startling provision that actually forbid Medicare from even trying to negotiate discounts with drug-makers.

Mission accomplished, a few weeks later you quit Congress (after having assured your constituents that you planned to run for re-election), and take a $2 million job as president of Pharma, the trade organization representing the very drug-makers who benefited, so handsomely, from the legislation.

Flash forward to 2009:  you find yourself up against a progressive White House, and a president who targeted you personally, in a televised advertising campaign.

What do you do?

You keep your friends close, your enemies closer.

Waste and Inefficiency in Hospitals: A Hospitalist Tells His Residents the Truth

Below, a memo and a chart that a hospitalist recently sent to his residents. To protect his identity, I have removed the name of his hospital from the memo. Suffice to say that it is a well-known hospital in one of the 20 largest cities in the U.S., and that it is located in a very affluent section of that city. This hospital does not serve an unusually large number of very poor or very sick patients.

The memo itself seems to me a splendid and courageous example of what physicians should be teaching residents. And he is an excellent teacher: the chart makes its points in a way that is easy for a busy resident to read quickly—and it drives the message home.

Truth Squad: The Insurance Industry Spreads Misinformation about What a Public Sector Plan Would Mean For Your Family

Claim:   Recently, Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive officer of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP),  has been trying to put the industry’s best foot forward, arguing that when it comes to reform, healthcare insurers have been the most cooperative members of the healthcare industry.

After all, insurers have agreed to stop shunning sick patients: They will no longer turn away customers who, through no fault of their own, suffer from pre-existing conditions such as breast cancer. Graciously, insurers have said that they will refrain from dropping paying customers because the insurer suddenly “discovers” a pre-existing condition --after the customer is diagnosed with MS. Finally, insurers have pledged to stop charging sicker patients sky-high premiums. Instead, everyone in a given community will pay the same premium for the same plan. (This is now the law in some states).

Truth: What the industry has agreed to hardly represents a “concession”. They have consented to do what insurance companies are supposed to do: cover not just the young and healthy, but those who might actually use the policy. 

But Ignagni is right on one point: Insurers are more enthusiastic about reform than most in the healthcare industry. This is hardly surprising. Universal coverage—with a mandate that everyone buy insurance--will bring them as many as 47 million new customers, government subsidies in hand.

What’s not to like?

Drug-Makers Celebrate—Prematurely?

 On Alternet, Bill Moyers summarizes what happened in D.C. last week: “Push finally came to shove in Washington . . . .as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat.” 

Moyers is right. But I’m more optimistic than he is about how this battle will end. As usual, Moyers, pulls no punches: “As the Republicans fired away, big business stepped up the attack too, their lobbying and advertising guns blazing. The Chamber of Commerce, for one, announced a major campaign of rallies and print and Internet ads to crush the White House plan for a competitive public option allowing consumers to choose between a government plan and private health insurance . . .

“Supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly though the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray.

“They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill -- any bill - passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, that it will be less Waterloo than watered down, a steady diluting of the change they had hoped for and that America needs."