Chipping Away at the Anechoic Effect: Now the New York Times Protests the Demise of the AHRQ National Guidelines Clearinghouse
DiscussionMany people bemoan the current political situation, but some feel there is nothing they could possibly do the improve things. We have been publishing this blog since 2004 with the hopes that chipping away at the anechoic effect which has hid the severity and nature of health care dysfunction might actually help to improve things. However, at times we wondered if we were having any effect. What good are individual actions like blog posts? It seems that most of us have little individual power. Collectively, though we may have more than we realize. Small individual actions ca...
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 20, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: AHRQ anechoic effect Donald Trump evidence-based medicine guidelines news media Source Type: blogs
A Physician Who Had Run Clinics Which Proselytized Patients is Now a Government Health Care Leader Positioned to Enforce Her Religious Beliefs on Patients and Citizens Who Do Not Hold Such Beliefs
DiscussionDr Foley is certainly entitled to her religious views. She is also entitled as a physician to avoid situations in which normal standards of care would push her to provide services to patients that conflict with her religious conviction. But she is not entitled as a physician to proselytize in the guise of medical practice.Furthermore, as a leader in a government health agency, she is not entitled to use that agency ' s power to enforce her personal religious beliefs on patients who do not hold such beliefs. Given her career, though, there is every reason to worry that she will do so. Furth...
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 15, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: core values deception DHHS Donald Trump mission-hostile management Source Type: blogs
" Hope in a Bottle " - Components of Purdue Pharma Stealth Marketing Campaign for Oxycontin Revealed by Legal Documents from Tennessee
Introduction: Disinformation and Stealth Marketing CampaignsBack in the distant past the US government made some attempt to hold big health care corporations to account for misleading marketing practices. We learned a lot about these practices from documents revealed in the resulting litigation, and in particular, about stealthy, deceptive systematicmarketing,lobbying, andpolicy advocacy campaigns on behalf of big health care organizations, often pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies. For example, in 2012 wefound out about the stealth marketing campaign used by GlaxoSmithKline to sell its a...
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 8, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: deception disinformation narcotics perverse incentives propaganda public relations Purdue Pharma stealth marketing Source Type: blogs
Growing Health Care and Grand Governmental Corruption - But Still Anechoic After All These Years
Here we go again. We have long been concerned about health care corruption as a major cause of health care dysfunction. Our last post on the topic wasin January, 2018.Summary: the Corruption of Health Care Leadership as a Major Cause of Health Care DysfunctionAs we wrote in August, 2017, Transparency International (TI) defines corruption asAbuse of entrusted power for private gainIn 2006,TI published a report on health care corruption, which asserted that corruption is widespread throughout the world, serious, and causes severe harm to patients and society.the scale of corruption is vast in both rich and poor countri...
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 1, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: anechoic effect bribery conflicts of interest Donald Trump health care corruption regulatory capture Source Type: blogs
Have They Finally Got to You? - the Firing of Dr Gu
DiscussionThis story suggests that in our current political era, health care professionals, particularly trainees or others at the bottom of the totem pole, may be increasingly beholden to the political sensibilities of their bosses, and hence increasingly wary of espousing political views that run counter to those of their bosses. While it is reasonable for residency programs to require their trainees to be professional, since when did " professional " mean stifling political views that might offend hospital corporate leadership?As we wrote in February, It may not be unreasonable to expect physicians and physici...
Source: Health Care Renewal - June 22, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: academic freedom anechoic effect Donald Trump free speech post-graduate medical education Vanderbilt University Source Type: blogs
Dander Still Up. Drowning in Great Dismal Swamp. Film at Eleven.
Maybe this is the last in my series of dander-raising essays, as recent national and world events have most definitely left so many of us with a raging case of TDS. (Trump Derangement Syndrome, look it up it ' s a thing).So many damned browser tabs open. So little time.Or maybe not. Who knows. Where are all these suicides coming from?My editor keeps telling me, " don ' t let it make you paralytic. " Hey, I ' m trying.Just sensing a kind of coalescence in all the corruption our bloggers keep writing about. How do we even differentiate these activities across so many sectors of society. We were going to see our swamp drained...
Source: Health Care Renewal - June 12, 2018 Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs
Why Did CVS Health Betray its Charitable Giving Policy and Social Responsibility Agenda to Donate to a Sketchy Non-Profit Devoted to Trump's Agenda?
DiscussionCVS Health says it donates to charity to improve health and health care, and that it has a social responsibility agenda to again improve health and keep the planet in balance. Yet it secretly donated to a " social welfare " organization that explicitly was devoted to upholding the Trump agenda, founded by former Trump campaign officials, at least two with questionable ethics, one of which pleaded guilty to federal crimes, and which ran a political polling operation that may have been illegal. When its donation was discovered, and the racist sayings of two, and apparently pro-Nazi sayings of anot...
Source: Health Care Renewal - June 5, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: bribery conflicts of interest crime CVS Donald Trump fraud health care corruption mission-hostile management Source Type: blogs
The Stealth Shutdown of the US Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) National Guideline Clearinghouse
DiscussionSo it seems that the report on clinical practice guidelines emphasized two issues highly relevant toHealth Care Renewal, the need fortransparency in guideline development, and the need to avoidconflicts of interest affecting the development process.Perhaps more because than despite that, as we noted above, by 2012 the IOM standards were largely ignored (as discussedhere). We speculated that these standards may have discomfited many people. They could have cost a lot of medical societies considerable commercial funding, and a lot of health care professionals on guideline panels considerable person...
Source: Health Care Renewal - June 1, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: AHRQ anechoic effect Donald Trump evidence-based medicine guidelines Source Type: blogs
The March of Legal Settlements Made by Pharmaceutical Companies is Diminishing - Presaging Even Less Accountablity for Top Health Care Organizational Leaders?
DiscussionSo my perceptions that the number of the sorts of legal settlements of interest to us has likely been diminishing was accurate. Unfortunately, rather than the decrease being due to better behavior, decresed reporting, or my laxity in case-finding, it now looks that US government efforts to combat bad behavior by big health care corporations and to hold top leaders of these organizations accountable is getting even more lax.So once again, with feeling... We seem to be sliding backwards in efforts to make the leaders of large health care organizations accountable, and particularly to combat the worse man...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 25, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: Donald Trump health care prices impunity kickbacks legal settlements Pfizer Source Type: blogs
A Higher Impunity - How Can we Reduce Health Care Leadership's Impunity When the President Claims His Own Impunity?
Impunity: an IntroductionWe believe that unaccountable leadership is a major cause of health care dysfunction. Impunity is an extreme form of unaccountable leadership.We have noted that despite numerous legal settlements made by health care organizations of alllegations likefraud,bribery, andkickbacks, almost never do top leaders who presided over these actions face any negative consequences. Lack of deterrence caused by such impunity appears to be a major cause of the epidemic of continuing unethical behavior,crime andcorruption on the part of large health care organizations. How executives got to the poi...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 20, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: crime deception Donald Trump fraud impunity kickbacks legal settlements perjury Source Type: blogs
Novartis' Latest Ethical Misadventure: Did it Pay to Play ... with the US President?
DiscussionMost corrupt actions require two parties. While it is understandable that there has been tremendous recent interest in evidence that the Trump regime is corrupt (lookhere), any such corruption had to have been enabled by unethical actions on the parts of others. Those others likely included large numbers of leaders of large corporations, including health care corporations. We have shown repeatedly that top leaders of US health care organizations have enjoyedimpunity that has allowed them to foster a host of unethical actions, includingcrimes such asbribery,fraud, andkickbacks, and truehealth car...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 11, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: bribery corporate integrity agreement crime Donald Trump fraud legal settlements Novartis Source Type: blogs
More Dander Rising: Ditto to Dr. Poses
Let me second the emotion now recently and repeatedly voiced by Dr. Poses in these pages. It ' s getting real hard to separate the health policy and malfeasance fecaliths from the general Washington Schei ßsturm raining down on us. We all feel pretty much buffeted non-stop, like(whomp!)badminton shuttlecocks in the corruption game the prevaricator-in-chief seems happily destined to carry on forever. Or at least until some better angels out there in America rise up to put an end to it. Because it ' s pretty obvious the party hacks clearly aren ' t going to. They ' re way too busy (padre you ' re fired! padre...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 8, 2018 Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs
The Two-Fold Intimidation of Dr Bornstein, as Orchestrated by Donald Trump, Apparently to Conceal Something About Trump's Medical History
DiscussionAs noted above, we have seen many cases in which health care professionals were pressured to violate their core values and ethical norms by outside parties, most often large health care organizations seeking financial gain.Now, in this new case, we see a single health care professional twice pressured to violate core values and ethical norms by a patient, a wealthy billionaire corporate CEO who became President of the United States. Thus we are now in a situation in which the President of the US, to whom all federal health care regulatory and law enforcement agencies at least nominally report, has shown con...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 4, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: core values Donald Trump fraud intimidation medical ethics medical record confidentiality Source Type: blogs
Don't Know Much About Health Care and Public Health, and Don't Care Much About Their Missions - but in Leadership Positions in US Government Health Agencies
Here we go again. As we We have frequently discussed how health care leadership is oftenill-informed ( look here). More and more people leading non-profit, for-profit and government health care organizations have had no training or experience in actually caring for patients, or in biomedical, clinical or public health research. Obviously health care and health policy decisions made by ill-informed people could have detrimental effects on patients ' and the public ' s health.Through 2016, our examples of ill-informed leadership in health care tended to be executives of hospital systems (e..g.,in 2014...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 27, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: DHHS disinformation Donald Trump ill-informed management mission-hostile management propaganda Source Type: blogs
Through the Revolving Door, with a Few Stumbles - Health Care Corporate Executives and Consultants Continue to Become Leaders of Trump's Department of Health and Human Services
We continue to see a remarkable stream of people transiting therevolving door from high-level positions in health care corporations to high-level positions in health care policy or regulation for the Trump administration. Lately, though, these transitions have not been without missteps. The most recent cases we have found, in the order of their public appearance, appear below.John Bardis, Who Went from MedAssets to Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Administration, Resigned Under FireWe first discussed the appointment of Mr Bardis in May, 2017,here. We noted then that most recently Mr Bar...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 18, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest CVS Donald Trump finance health care corruption Pfizer revolving doors Source Type: blogs
