Viewpoints: Compounding Pharmacy Issues — Protecting Public Health; Fighting Fraud; Yelp And Patient Care

The Huffington Post: Insurance Fraud Scheme Sheds Light On Deeply Troubled Compounding Pharmacy Industry
Last month, eight people in Florida were charged in a massive insurance fraud scheme that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. A number of compounding pharmacies in the Tampa Bay and Miami areas were found to be submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims and covering them up with bribes and kickbacks; experts believe that thousands of consumers had their personal information misused in the scheme. All of this comes as a key federal agency is considering stricter oversight of the growing—and dangerously under-regulated—field of compounding pharmacies in the United States. (Sally Greenberg, 9/12)

Stat: Compounding Pharmacies Must Safeguard Public Health
Federal regulations put in place as part of the Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013 aim to make drugs produced at compounding facilities safer than ever before. These new regulations have generated significant pushback from the compounding community. They have also placed many of these pharmacies at a crossroads: they must choose either to limit what they produce to lessen federal oversight or invest in a higher quality, larger-scale operation so they can offer a greater range of solutions for patients and providers. (Shaun Noorian, 9/9)

The New York Times: How Yelp Reviews Can Help Improve Patient Care
Hospitals and many insurance carriers care about patient satisfaction. It especially matters to hospitals because insurance payments can be influenced by how patients rate the care they receive, as well as by the health of the patient, which hospitals usually report. Many people in the health care profession are put off by this. They argue that patient satisfaction scores aren’t necessarily aligned with outcomes. Moreover, they say that trying to improve satisfaction is a waste of time. (Aaron E. Carroll, 9/12)

Stat: How Researchers Can Lower The Risk In Sharing Personal Health Information
Simply removing information such as names and addresses from a dataset doesn’t render the data anonymous and ensure that an individual can’t be identified. Conferring real privacy protection means carefully assessing the re-identification risk, setting acceptable risk thresholds, and transforming the data using de-identification standards. Several such guidelines and standards exist for doing this. The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), for example, recently released a de-identification framework that organizations can use when creating, accessing, storing, or exchanging personal information. Other organizations, like the Institute of Medicine and the Council of Canadian Academies have adopted similar standards that permit sharing sensitive data while managing the risks of re-identification. Current evidence shows that the risk of re-identification using these approaches is very small. (Sam Wehbe, 9/12)

The Columbus Dispatch: This Is How To Fix Obamacare
Come November, the grim trudge across the increasingly barren Obamacare landscape begins anew. A first tranche of states has approved 2017 rates with cardiac-arrest-inducing premium increases. And in many places across the nation, people will find drastically fewer choices of plans. Insurers fled because they didn’t want to lose more money on a government-run market that is so far out of whack. (9/13)

The Washington Post: It’s True: More People Use Guns To Kill Themselves Than To Kill Others.
A year later, I remain haunted by the death of a friend, 39 when he shot himself, because I’m pretty sure his life could have been saved. Local police called his death a “suicide by gunshot” — one of more than 20,000 people a year who take their own lives with a firearm. Yes, it’s true: More people use guns to kill themselves than to kill others, according to 2012 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicides may be the great untold story in the gun debate. (Steven Petrow, 9/12)

Stat: In Puerto Rico, A Crash Course On Zika Virus
Was DEET scarier than Zika, I wondered, as I read about incidents of seizures, impaired cognitive function, and death associated with the repellent, developed for jungle warfare during World War II and used in Vietnam. “There’s no doubt that if you used DEET every day for a long period of time, it would not be good,” Dr. Alster emailed me after I pestered her. “But in the short term, there is NO BETTER mosquito repellent. So if you want to minimize your risk of Zika or Chikungunya, use it!” (Maureen Dowd, 9/12)

Forbes: Health Care Needs Effective Reforms, Not The CREATES Act
Congress is back in session. With the election looming, this means a frenetic dash to pass bills on a number of big ticket items, including the budget and Zika funding. While the legislative fight over these issues will likely dominate the headlines, we cannot forget about other below-the-radar, but nevertheless critical, issues. One critical, but below-the radar, issue is a Senate bill that could force the manufacturer of innovative drugs that are used to treat serious illnesses to prematurely turn over samples and patented information to generic manufacturers. (Wayne Winegarden, 9/12)

Health Affairs Blog: The Opioid Abuse Crisis Is A Rare Area Of Bipartisan Consensus
The U.S. is experiencing political polarization over many issues, including health. There are few examples where Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as those among the public who identify with the two parties, agree on a set of policies. One of these exceptions involves policies to address the opioid abuse crisis facing the country today. (Robert Blendon, Caitlin McMurtry, John Benson, and Justin Sayde, 9/12)

Los Angeles Times: Yes On Proposition 52 To Keep Medi-Cal Funded
About 1 of every 6 Californians lives in poverty, which helps explain why almost 12 million state residents are enrolled in Medi-Cal — the state’s version of Medicaid, the health insurance program for impoverished Americans that’s jointly funded by federal and state taxpayers. California’s enrollment is by far the largest in the country. Yet because the state is relatively wealthy, California has to pick up a larger share of its Medicaid costs than almost every other state does. The higher a state’s median income, the smaller the fraction of Medicaid costs that the federal government will pay. (9/13)

Richmond Times-Dispatch: This Year, Virginia, Say Yes To Medicaid Expansion
The current state of the Virginia budget requires that we revisit the issue of Medicaid expansion. There has been a lot of confusion and misinformation about the impact and costs of expansion. ... Medicaid expansion would have made the budget shortfall smaller. More important, we still have the opportunity to take this action, making medical care available to 400,000 Virginians while relieving some of the difficult budget decisions that lie ahead. (Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources William A. Hazel, 9/12)

The Des Moines Register: Managed Care Has Strong Record Of Serving Iowa Children
National studies ranking Iowa at the top for children’s well-being have consistently shown that our state is a wonderful place for kids to grow up in a healthy, safe environment and be nurtured to become productive adults. (Charles M. Palmer, 9/12)

Sacramento Bee: Maybe Dr. Bob Sears Can’t Have It Both Ways On Vaccines 
Now, Sears is in hot water with the state Medical Board for allegedly writing an excuse note that allowed a little boy not to receive any vaccinations, even though Sears never bothered gathering medical evidence that vaccines were dangerous for the child. California’s tough new vaccination law allows children not to be immunized when there’s a valid medical reason. But the case for which Sears faces discipline, including possible loss of his medical license, is puzzling. (Karen Klein, 9/12)