From a New England Journal of Medicine article:
Medicare negotiation of prescription-drug prices would bring U.S. government policies in line with those of other high-income countries, and the idea is popular with both the public and policy analysts. But it would represent a sea change for pharmaceutical firms, which will maintain that any threat to their pricing power will slow innovation.
Negotiating prices of 10 too-little drugs and 10 too-late drugs to levels currently paid in the United Kingdom would produce about $26.8 billion in savings in 2019 alone, most of which ($25.9 billion) would come from savings on drugs in the latter category. Over time, the drugs included could change. For instance, in 2020 this category might include Revlimid (lenalidomide), which generated $6.5 billion in 2018 U.S. sales; its price in the United Kingdom is 32% of that in the United States.
Americans all along the political spectrum favor allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for prescription drugs.1 In September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced what is now called the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 (H.R. 3), and the bill would have Medicare do just that.
Although there are draft pieces of legislation and regulation that take aim at the rising cost of drugs, H.R. 3 is the legislative tip of the spear for price negotiation. If it became law, Medicare would target drugs that claim the largest share of the health care budget and that face limited competition from generics or biosimilars. I propose an alternative set of drugs for price negotiation: those that have too little evidence to support full approval or are too late in their life cycle to justify continued high prices.
To read more: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1912736?query=recirc_inIssue_bottom_article
Any customer with an active prescription and an Alexa-enabled device will be able to access the medication management skill on the device, a Giant Eagle spokesperson told CNBC. Rachel Jiang, who leads the Amazon Alexa health and wellness team, said the company began developing the skill after noticing that customers were using the devices to create medication reminders.
An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can be illuminating for both. Today’s guest, Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the world’s most celebrated literary scholars, famous for helping to establish the New
Historicism school of criticism, which he also refers to as “cultural poetics.” We talk about how art becomes entangled with the politics of its day, and how we can learn about ourselves and other cultures by engaging with stories and their milieu.
For the second year in a row, editors at The New York Times got together for a live taping of the podcast to discuss the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. “These are books that we think will endure, that will be looked at and read and consulted and referred to well after the year in which they were named,” says Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, as part of her introductory remarks about what the editors look for in their selections.
I chose to call myself a portrait photographer because labels were always being thrown on me. When I was at Rolling Stone I was a ‘rock-and-roll photographer’, at Vanity Fair I was a ‘celebrity photographer’. You know, I’m just a photographer. I realised I wasn’t really a journalist. I have a point of view and, while these photographs that I call portraits can be conceptual or illustrative, that keeps me on the straight and narrow. So I settled on this brand called ‘portraits’ because it had a lot of leeway. But I don’t think of myself that way now: I think of myself as a conceptual artist using photography.
I remember going to the Factory in 1976 and watching Andy Warhol work. I’d been there before, earlier in the 70s, photographing Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn, and then Paul Morrissey. Warhol was a fixture of New York. It was just shocking when he died, because he was everywhere. I don’t know how he did it, but he was out at everything. You felt that if he was at a place you were at, then you were at the right place.
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