That website John Oliver told you about: how much money Big Pharma has given your doctor?

On This Week Tonight, watch John Oliver eviscerate the stunningly corrupt practices of Big Pharma. This IS journalism. In the piece, he directs people to Open Payments, which is "a federal program that annually collects and makes information public about financial relationships between the health care industry, physicians, and teaching hospitals.

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) collects information from manufacturers of drugs and devices about payments and other transfers of value they make to physicians and teaching hospitals. These payments and other transfers of value can be for many purposes, like research, consulting, travel, and gifts. CMS will be making this data publicly available each reporting year.

In other words, in the words of Mark Evanier, "you can look up your doctor and see how much loot he's taken and from whom."

The placebo effect

The placebo effect is a real phenomenon, first identified in the 1950s and studied ever since, with sometimes surprising results. Take, for example, a 2008 study conducted by a team led by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. Ariely and company gathered 82 people and gave them electric shocks in their wrists. Then, each of the test subjects were given one of two pills, shocked again, and asked to compare the pre-pill pain to the post-pill discomfort. Of the first group, 85% said the pill reduced the pain. On the other hand, only 61% of the second group said that the pill did its job. Whatever the researchers gave their "patients" worked -- but the first pill clearly worked better.

It shouldn't surprise you that some of these test subjects received placebos. That, however, is not the case. All of the test subjects received placebos, and on top of that, both groups received the exact thing -- sugar pills of identical size, shape, etc. So why did the first group feel less pain than the second?

SEE the answer at Now I Know.

A whole lot of health-related data

From the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality

2010 Hospital Inpatient Stays File
2010 Prescribed Medicines File
Health Care Expenditures for the Five Most Common Conditions of Adults Ages 40 to 64, 2009
Preventive Health Care Utilization by Adult Residents of MSAs & Non-MSAs: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, 2009
Use & Expenses for Office-Based Physician Visits by Specialty, 2009: Estimates for the U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population


From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

2011 Imputed Family Income/Personal Earnings Files


From the National Center for Health Statistics

Wait Time for Treatment in Hospital Emergency Departments: 2009

Learn online about health & wellness from the National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine can help you learn about the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment for a variety of diseases and conditions. From Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms to Varicose Veins, and many topics in between.

Created for patients, you can learn about the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment for a variety of diseases and conditions. Also learn about surgeries, prevention and wellness.
Each tutorial includes animated graphics, audio, and easy-to-read language

Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

From the Department of Health & Human Services:

This public use data file contains jobs-level data from the 2009 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS and SPSS programming statements and in SAS transport format, this public use file provides information collected on a nationally representative sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States during the calendar year 2009. The file contains job-level information collected in Rounds 3-5 for the thirteenth Panel and Rounds 1-3 for the fourteenth Panel of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering calendar year 2009); it includes variables pertaining to household-reported jobs, including wages, hours, industry, and occupation.

First Glimpse at Medical Error Rates Separates the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Between Oct. 1, 2008 and June 30, 2010, Medicare patients at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Yonkers, N.Y., suffered thirteen instances of severe bed sores during their stay requiring additional treatment, a rate of nearly 2.9 per 1,000 treated. At St. John’s Riverside Hospital, three miles down Broadway from St. Joseph’s, the rate was 20 times lower: only one severe bed sore was reported, even though St. John's discharged far more Medicare patients during that period -- 8,270 to St. Joseph's 4,541.

Over the protests of groups like the American Hospital Association, Medicare officials this month publicly revealed for the first time where harmful events like these took place. In addition to bed sores, the data includes information on trauma and falls, infections and the egregious errors known as "never events," such as patients being given the wrong blood type, or foreign objects being left in the body after surgery.

As many as 98,000 Americans are thought to die annually from medical errors, and about as many succumb to infections they picked up during a hospital stay, according to oft-cited figures released a decade ago, but new research published last week suggests that "adverse events" like these occur about 10 times as frequently as previously thought, in about a third of all hospital stays.

MORE HERE.

In Case of Emergency: New Data on Medical Benefits

Most medical insurance plans provide coverage for emergency care, including visits to emergency rooms and transportation by ambulance, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on the National Compensation Survey (NCS). The study also found that emergency care coverage was subject to a variety of limits, including copayments and deductibles.

Results of Selected Medical Benefits Survey Released

The National Compensation Survey this week released data on additional medical benefits not previously published in its recent survey of benefit provisions. The following are the 12 additional benefits included in this report: emergency room visits; ambulance services; diabetes care management; kidney dialysis; physical therapy; durable medical equipment; prosthetics; maternity care; infertility treatment; sterilization; gynecological exams and services; and organ and tissue transplantation. The findings presented include information on the coverage or exclusion of each of these benefits and the type of limits imposed on them.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 directs the Secretary of Labor to conduct a survey of employer-sponsored health plans to determine the benefits typically covered by employers, and to report the results of the survey to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This study was conducted to supplement the medical benefit provisions regularly published as part of the National Compensation Survey’s (NCS) employee benefits program.

The full version of the report is available here (PDF). Links to this report and other recent health benefits data are available on the National Compensation Survey web page. The 12 additional medical benefits come from the same sample that yielded data for NCS: Health and Retirement Plan Provisions in Private Industry in the United States, 2009 (PDF).

OTC meds will need Rx for Health Flex Spending

I believe there are some really good aspects of the new health care bill. This is not one of them: Over-the-counter medications will require a prescription to buy them with flexible spending account funds next year under new health care reform regulations. "The health care reform law sharply restricts FSA reimbursements for OTC purchases such as nonprescription pain relievers, cold medicines, antacids and allergy medications." Insulin is specifically excluded from this ruling.

Specifically, "the IRS says OTC reimbursements require a prescription, which it defines as a 'written or electronic order for a medicine or drug that meets the legal requirements of a prescription in the state in which a medical expense is incurred and that is issued by an individual who is legally authorized to issue a prescription in that state,'" whatever THAT means.

Public Citizen Releases Annual Ranking of State Medical Boards

Public Citizen’s annual ranking of state medical boards shows that most states, including two of the largest, are not living up to their obligations to protect patients from doctors who are practicing substandard medicine, according to the report released today.

For the first time since Public Citizen has been publishing the rankings, California, the largest state in the country, and Florida, one of the largest, are among the 10 states with the lowest rates of serious disciplinary actions. Minnesota was the worst state when it came to disciplining doctors and, along with Maryland, South Carolina and Wisconsin, has consistently been among the worst 10 states for each of the last six rankings.