How Institutional Conflicts of Interest Exacerbate the Anechoic Effect - the Example of ASCO Fearing "Biting the Hand that Feeds You"

As we recently discussed (here, here, here and here), in May, 2015, the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the world's foremost medical journal, published an editorial and a three-part commentary arguing that current concerns about the effects of financial conflicts of interest (COI) on health care are overblown(1-4).  On June 1, the Wall Street Journal published a report on the 2015 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) that provided a vivid example of why these concerns should not be dismissed.Questioning Drug Prices at the ASCO MeetingThe main issue in the article was:In a sign of growing frustration with rising drug prices, a prominent cancer specialist on Sunday sharply criticized the costs of new cancer treatments in a high-profile speech at one of the largest annual medical meetings in the U.S.'These drugs cost too much,' Leonard Saltz, chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said in a speech heard by thousands of doctors here for the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The notion that health care prices are high and are rising continuously in the US should hardly be novel for regular Health Care Renewal readers.  We have been writing about it for a while, starting in 2005. We first posted about high drug prices in July, 2005, with the example of BilDil.  This was a brand-name combination drug that included two compounds that were already cheaply available in...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: American Society of Clinical Oncology anechoic effect conflicts of interest health care prices institutional conflicts of interest medical societies You heard it here first Source Type: blogs