Top Policy and Medicine Stories for 2015

  At the end of each year, we attempt to give you an overview of what happened in previous year and give some spin on predictions for the coming year, much like an end-of-the-year family newsletter. For those who are a bit more nostalgic, here is a link to our 2014 story. Perhaps the End of Off Label Lawsuits? With the Amarin Injunction, Caronia standing for two years without any pushback from the government, and the recent settlement with Pacira, there seems to be a trend of the FDA pulling away from off-label citations. Perhaps this trend is a signal of the end of cases against manufacturers for off label promotion. At least one Assistant United States Attorney this year stated that off-label cases were "dead." This end of off-label suits can be a good thing, but now we should be on the lookout for more enforcement around the areas of kickbacks, pricing, and manufacturing. Open Payments Year 2– Where Did All the Research Money Go In late June, we saw the release of the first full year of data for the Open Payments program. What we saw – unsurprisingly – was that a vast majority of the funds companies spend go to research. What did surprise us, however, was that when we looked at the year over year data (last five months of 2013 compared to the last five months of 2014), research spending dropped 30% from 2014-2015, yet the number of payments remained virtually the same. Many Settlements, but Not Many Big Ones 2015 seems to have been the year of se...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs