Tag Archives: annual

A Senator Is Taking on the Pharma Companies Behind the Opioid Epidemic

by trinidadgloucest Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) launched an investigation into how the nation’s leading painkiller manufacturers fueled the current opioid crisis—the most deadly drug epidemic in US history.

McCaskill requested internal sales and marketing materials, addiction studies, and details on compliance with governmental organizations from the top five opioid manufacturers: Purdue, Janssen/Johnson & Johnson, Insys, Mylan, and Depomed. If the companies refuse to comply, McCaskill would need support from her Republican colleagues on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in order to subpoena the documents.

This is the most far-reaching senate investigation into the opioid manufacturers to date, following a 2012 Senate Finance Committee investigation into payments to pain advocacy groups.

It comes at a time when drug overdoses are killing more Americans than car accidents or gun violence. Of the 52,000 overdose deaths in 2015, two thirds were associated with opiates such as OxyContin, Vicodin, heroin, and fentanyl.

Experts trace the epidemic back to the early ’90s, when doctors started treating pain more aggressively. As I wrote last year:

Fueling the storm were pharmaceutical companies, which aggressively—and, in many cases, misleadingly—marketed painkillers to doctors and patients. Purdue Pharma, which introduced OxyContin in 1995, funded more than 20,000 pain-related educational programs between 1996 and 2002, according to an article last year in the Annual Review of Public Health.

Noting that doctors were wary of prescribing opioids because of concerns about addiction, the company funded studies finding that “physical dependence” on opioids is different from addiction and “clinically unimportant.” It provided financial backing to the American Pain Society, which introduced the “Pain is the Fifth Vital Sign” campaign, and the Joint Commission, which accredits health care organizations, in addition to other physician and patient groups. Purdue Pharma and its executives were fined more than $600 million in 2007 after they were found guilty of misleading regulators, doctors, and patients about the drug’s addictive qualities.

“All of this didn’t happen overnight—it happened one prescription and marketing program at a time,” said McCaskill in a statement. “This investigation is about finding out whether the same practices that led to this epidemic still continue today, and if decisions are being made that harm the public health.”

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A Senator Is Taking on the Pharma Companies Behind the Opioid Epidemic

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John Oliver wants America to clean its plate

by CathrynMabry Posted on July 20, 2015

John Oliver wants America to clean its plate

By on 20 Jul 2015commentsShare

As Last Week Tonight host John Oliver suggests in the video above, what is more American than food waste? From farm to table to dump, Americans toss out up to a whopping 40 percent of it.

“Food waste is like the band Rascal Flatts,” jokes Oliver. “It can fill a surprising number of stadiums, even though many people consider it complete garbage.” It’s garbage for the climate too: Annual greenhouse gas emissions due to food waste add up to about twice the annual emissions of India.

Much of the dumping can be pinned to arbitrary sell-by dates and aesthetic criteria formally and informally governing the food that makes it to market. The Canadian regulatory text on apples, for example, runs upwards of 30 pages and covers everything from apple shape and firmness to hail injury and sunburn (which is apparently a thing that can happen to apples). Revising regulations like these and getting ugly produce onto the shelves could be a good first step toward curbing the waste trend.

There’s probably a food for thought joke to be made, but I’ll spare you.

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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Food Waste

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John Oliver wants America to clean its plate

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The Annual Medicare Doc Fix: Not as Bad as You Think!

by ElliottClaudio Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a bit of contrarianism for you today: Austin Frakt says that the much-maligned Medicare “doc fix” actually works pretty well. This is Congress’s annual charade in which it overrides the formula for Medicare reimbursements to doctors, resulting in doctors getting paid more—but without ever changing the formula itself. (Why? Because changing the formula would cost money, and they’d have to figure out how to pay for it. Better to just kick the can down the road each year.)

So from one point of view, the formula is just a joke. However:

From another point of view, the formula — as flawed as it is — has helped keep Medicare spending lower than it might otherwise have been. Instead of cutting physician payments by the large amount the S.G.R. demands, Congress has increased payment rates, but typically by only tiny amounts — at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent. That pace does not keep up with the typical cost of care.

The gap can be seen in the chart below. The bottom line illustrates how Congress has permitted Medicare physician payments to grow. The middle line shows an index of medical spending — spending at a typical physician’s practice over time — that is a proxy for the change in price for a typical, or average, medical treatment.

….The relatively gentle increases in Medicare payment rates makes clear that the formula is not the problem. I think that the formula has actually helped Congress be more fiscally responsible than it otherwise might have been. To physicians who fear a double-digit decrease in payment rates called for by the formula, a 0.5 percent or a 1.5 percent increase that Congress passes looks like a great deal.

So there you go. Two cheers for the Sustainable Growth Formula!

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The Annual Medicare Doc Fix: Not as Bad as You Think!

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World leaders emitted 2.5 million kilograms of CO2 getting to Davos

by rikkiqlyons Posted on January 24, 2013

World leaders emitted 2.5 million kilograms of CO2 getting to Davos

By Philip Bump

The World Economic Forum worries about climate change. Here is the organization’s page on the issue, including its “CEO Climate Policy Recommendations.” (For example: “‘Environmentally effective and economically efficient’ framework proposed to succeed Kyoto Accord.” Get on that, U.N.!) This week, WEF’s CEO friends are at the Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which we’ve mentioned.

Which made us wonder: How much did getting all of those CEOs and government leaders and baseball players together itself contribute to climate change?

The answer is: quite a bit. But before we get to the actual number, here’s how we got it. Earlier this week, the business site Quartz got its hands on the complete attendee list for this year’s Davos gathering. Quartz parsed the data about 15 different ways (go play with the sorting tool!) and, when we asked, were happy to share the data with us. (The Forum has an updated list [PDF], but Quartz’ data is more than enough for our purposes.)

Getting to Davos isn’t easy. The picture above shows the town itself, small boxes at the base of various Alps and foothills. There’s no airport. The only ways in are by train, car, or — for the elite of the elite — helicopter. The closest major airport is in Zurich, about a three-hour train ride away. For the smallest possible carbon footprint, then, someone from the United States would fly to Zurich and take the train in. (This is what I did, in 2009.) Seems modest. Until you realize that over 700 people came from the United States to attend the Annual Meeting — not including World Economic Forum staff or support staff.

We took Quartz’ data on the originating country of each of the 2,500-plus listed attendees, and estimated the flight distance between that country’s capital (for the sake of convenience) and Zurich. To calculate carbon dioxide production, we used a figure of .21 kilograms per passenger per kilometer for the flight, and 22 kilograms for a three-hour train trip, per person. To be extra generous, we didn’t include people actually from Switzerland.

Here’s what those flights looked like, as the crow flies. The width of a line represents the number of people from each country that attended Davos. (Every line except the United States is to scale. The United States had two-and-a-half times the next largest contingent, so it would have skewed everything.)

And now, the numbers. The 2,630 attendees cumulatively travelled over 550,000 kilometers by plane; in doing so, they generated 2.47 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. 2,470 metric tons. Add in train travel — 57,860 more kilograms — and the total footprint for those jetting in to Davos is 2,520 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The data, by country:

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t an earth-shattering (earth-boiling?) amount of carbon dioxide. It’s the equivalent of a year’s production by 350 people from China (or 146 Americans). But again: This is only travel to the site, only including attendees. There’s a whole coterie of staff and drivers and media who don’t figure into this number.

As we noted yesterday, the Forum this week released a report reinforcing the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel use, presumably even 2,500 tons of it. So we’ll grant it an exemption for the carbon pollution the gathering itself creates. After all, getting people together to discuss important world issues certainly takes precedence. When these people leave Davos — doubling the total emissions to over 5,000 tons of CO2 — they’ll at least be bringing back some of what they learned to their home countries.

Incidentally, if you’re at Davos, you still have time to get to the forum “Life Lessons from Jazz — Improvisation as a Way of Life.” If you’re pressed for time, borrow someone’s town car.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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