OPENING: American cancer patients spent more than $21 billion on their care in 2019. That $21.09 billion included out-of-pocket costs of $16.22 billion and patient time costs of $4.87 billion. As cancer survival rates rise, so do the price tags of life-saving treatments. Monthly drugs costs may reach $100,000, causing many Americans to struggle with the physical and emotional effects of high out-of-pocket medical costs. Even worse, others are completely priced out of the hope for a cure
Category Archive: Bad practices
SUMMARY: Medicare spent nearly $600 million over a three-year period to pay for four cancer drugs with no clinical benefit an analysis published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine found. More than $170 million of this spending was for products voluntarily withdrawn by their manufacturers after clinical trials showed that they did not improve overall survival in people with various types of cancer.
SUMMARY: (Times) The financial windfall at Moderna, the biotech company behind one of the three federally cleared Covid-19 vaccines, has propelled three new names onto Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States. However, it’s the NIH’s vaccine. It is not merely Moderna’s vaccine. Federal scientists helped invent it, and taxpayers are funding its development.
SUMMARY:
- The FDA has many puzzled as to why they approve some drugs with questionable data and ask for more data on other drugs.
- The FDA approves drugs on the potential to save a life, the cost of the drugs is never considered in the process.
- The FDA has been under criticism, but an internal investigation will focus on approval processes, not “why” a drug was approved.
- Our healthcare system cannot continue to support marginally effective drugs. We need to learn to say NO.
- Drug companies know how to play the system.
SKIMMERS SUMMARY:
- Jefferies analysts found doctors have shown strong interest in prescribing Aduhelm for about 35% of early-stage Alzheimer’s patients with mild cognitive impairment after surveying 50 U.S. neurologists or psychiatrists currently treating about 12,000 Alzheimer’s patients. Source: Fierce Pharma
- If that enthusiasm pans out in the long run, it could mean at least 300,000 patients taking the drug, or $10 billion to $15 billion in peak Aduhelm from U.S. sales alone, which is above consensus estimates of around $7 billion to $8 billion, the team said.
- One agency FDA adviser, resigning from his committee post in protest, called it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.” Source: STAT News
- Our healthcare system can’t continue to support drugs that don’t have good clinical outcomes behind them.
KEY POINTS:
- Winston Churchill once said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Display ads are usually reported to have an overall click rate of about five clicks in ten thousand ads served. If you want to know why the web is so appallingly littered with ads, it’s because to get five clicks you have to run 10,000 ads.
- 60% of the clicks are reported to be mistakes.
- You are more likely to complete Navy Seal training than click on a banner ad. According to research company Lumen, only 9% of banner ads are even noticed for a second.
- Studies show that CTRs have little to no correlation to ad effectiveness, yet it is still the most widely utilized measurement (or Key Performance Indicator, in ad jargon) of online advertising performance.
Source: Bob Hoffman
QUICK READ: If you start to lose key people, you won’t be able to keep the business you do have, and things will go from bad to worse. Companies who see their good employees as “replaceable” are wrong. Good employees are not replaceable. Pharma cannot afford to let good people leave without so much as an exit interview to try and retain them.
SUMMARY: One of the biggest complaints people have about their health is the lack of sleep caused by many factors, from diet and weight to chronic stress. DTC for a product that can keep people awake for nine hours is a message for potential abuse. Did I mention that they are using a flying pig in their DTC?