Tag Archives: Cancer

Could Lawyers Fix The Rising Cost of Medicine?

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Drug Promotion, Government, Health Law, Health Reform, Intellectual Property, Patent Law, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

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Send In The Lawyers: A Partial Fix For America’s Dystopian Prescription Drug Market, by Max Kennerly, Esq., Litigation & Trial Blog

http://tinyurl.com/nb82ky8

It’s hard to read any news about prescription drugs these days without wondering if you’ve somehow fallen into a Philip K. Dick novel. Just look at some of these titles over the past week:

All of these stories are about different drugs, but the common theme among all of the stories is, of course, money. The Mayo Clinical Proceedings recently found ‘In the United States, the average price of cancer drugs for about a year of therapy increased from $5000 to $10,000 before 2000 to more than $100,000 by 2012, while the average household income has decreased by about 8% in the past decade. Further, although 85% of cancer basic research is funded through taxpayers’ money, Americans with cancer pay 50% to 100% more for the same patented drug than patients in other countries.’ . . .

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Leiomyosarcoma And Other Types of Cancer.

08 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by in Health Law

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Leiomyosarcoma – Information for Leiomyosarcoma Families

Leiomyosarcoma.org

No, I can’t pronounce this, and I won’t pretend that I know much about it. This is a rare type of cancer that attacks soft tissue and involuntary muscle. The good news is that, if caught early, it can be effectively removed and treated. Learn more about it at http://www.leiomyosarcoma.org/blog.

There are many different types of cancer – more than I can name. If you are like me, you have lost family and friends to this disease, or perhaps you know someone, as I do, who happily are cured. Regardless, any one diagnosed with cancer goes down a difficult road. You will find more information at these links:

National Cancer Institute

http://www.cancer.gov/

American Association of Cancer Research

http://tinyurl.com/o22o4k5

American Cancer Society

http://www.cancer.org/

Cancer Health Center – Web MD

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/

Cancer Treatment Center of America

http://www.cancercenter.com/cancer/

 

Will Insurers Win Battle Against Rising Cancer Treatment Costs?

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Drug Promotion, Health Law, Health Reform, Insurance Coverage, Insurance Law

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Insurers Take Up Fight Against Rising Chemotherapy Costs, by Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News 

http://tinyurl.com/no6clm6

Some cancer patients and their insurers are seeing their bills for chemotherapy jump sharply, reflecting increased drug prices and hospitals’ push to buy oncologists’ practices and then bill at higher rates.

Patients say, ‘I’ve been treated with Herceptin for breast cancer for several years and it was always $5,000 for the drug and suddenly it’s $16,000 — and I was in the same room with the same doctor same nurse and the same length of time,’ said Dr. Donald Fischer, chief medical officer for Highmark, the largest health plan in Pennsylvania.

Like other insurers, Highmark found that when hospital systems bought doctors’ practices, chemotherapy costs rose because physicians’ offices were then deemed ‘hospital outpatient centers’ and could charge more for overhead.

Now insurers are pushing back. In what may be the first move of its kind, Highmark in April stopped paying higher fees for chemotherapy drugs given to patients whose doctors work for hospitals, instead paying the same price they would have had the doctor remained independent. . . .

Korean Samsung Workers Dying of Leukemia and Other Rare Cancers.

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Android Phones, Employment Law, International Law, Legal Technology, Workers' Compensation

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Samsung’s War at Home, by Cam Simpson, Technology, Bloomberg’s Week

http://tinyurl.com/nltoss3

Just inside his single-story home, built of concrete blocks and coated in turquoise paint, Hwang Sang-ki, a 58-year-old Korean taxi driver, sits on a floor mat. He’s clasping a small handbag, once bright white and now dull after years on a shelf. He pulls out a snapshot of 13 smiling young women, all co-workers at Samsung Electronics (005930:KS), off-duty and posing in three rows, each embracing or leaning into the other. The leaves of a tree behind them are turning golden in the autumn chill.

‘Here,’ says Hwang, pointing to two women in the center of the group. Both had the same job at the same semiconductor factory, on the same line, standing side by side at the same workstation, dipping computer chips into the same vat of chemicals. Both got a particularly aggressive form of the blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia. One was his daughter, Yu-mi. In South Korea, only about 3 out of every 100,000 people die of leukemia. ‘They worked together, and they died,’ says Hwang. The snapshot is among a few private memories Hwang keeps of his late daughter.

The story of the two women, and dozens of Samsung workers with leukemia and other rare cancers, is now a very public one in South Korea. In February and March, Koreans could see two movies depicting the seven-year battle led by the Hwangs and other families against Korea’s biggest and most influential corporation. . . .