Pharmaceutical Industry

If you wonder why health care reform is so complicated and contentious -- one reason may be that, as the Center for Public Integrity put it, 4,525 lobbyists are swarming the Capitol to have their say. Eight lobbyists for each member of Congress. Of course, there are lobbyists on both sides -- advocates of reform as well as enemies. Even organizations like Americans for the Arts and the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions got in the act. As did companies from soup (Campbells) to nuts. (Well, Donuts. Dunkin' Donuts). Health lobbying in 2009 cost about $1.2 billion, as best as CPI could break it down.

Just because a drug is new, it isn’t always necessarily better.

Nor, according to a Consumers Union article published in today’s Washington Post, does newer always mean safer.

More than half of all prescription drugs cause adverse effects. That’s a pretty startling (and scary) statistic. Many of these adverse side effects are not exposed until after the Food and Drug Administration have already approved the drug. Maybe not for years down the road.

According to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, in 2008, more than 100,000 “serious injuries related to adverse drug events” were reported to the FDA -- an increase of about 25 percent since 2007.

Suzanne Bull always half expected that she'd get cancer. After all, she lived in Marin County, California, where breast cancer rates are among the highest in the country. Still, she was determined to do whatever she could to protect herself. She ate right and exercised, and every year, she went into San Francisco to get a mammogram.

Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia's Northeast Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall, workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus.

The man who would be known as Patient No. 1 emerged from routine open-heart surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in stable condition. Then he began to bleed uncontrollably. Surgeons rushed him back to the operating room to reopen his chest, but by the time they could stop the hemorrhaging, Patient No. 1 was barely breathing and in a coma.

On Aug. 15, 2000, shortly before he was discharged on his way to a nursing home, a physician wrote a terse final diagnosis in his chart: "Medical disaster."

The public's faith in President Barack Obama's plan for health care reform is fading. Proposals ranging from the public insurance option to reimbursing physicians for end-of-life counseling are mired in a debate that's as overheated as August temperatures. Even the seemingly self-evident idea that the nation has a moral duty to make sure all citizens have basic access to health care is up for grabs. But there's one aspect of health care reform that California voters support almost universally: better medical evidence.

It's no secret that the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world. We spend nearly twice as much per person as do other developed countries for health outcomes that are no better and in some cases much worse. Moreover, the citizens of most other countries, including Canada and the U.K., who are routinely reviled by opponents of "socialized" medicine, express greater satisfaction with their health care systems than we do with ours.

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties.

But some, like Shannon Brownlee, author of “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer,” question the revenue-driven prescribathon. Should drugs “that may have a really serious side effect called suicide,” be used for simple knee ...

Shannon Brownlee discusses her new book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer on NBC affiliate WSCH6. LINK to video