Viewpoints: A List Of Steps To Combat Opioid Crisis; What Can Go Wrong If Hospitals Get Into The Drug Business

Boston Globe: How To Fight The Opioid Epidemic
On some levels, 2017 was a year of progress for addiction treatment, prevention, and management. ...Yet none of these initiatives reduced the number of overdose deaths, which exceeded 60,000 in 2016 and is sure to be higher when the 2017 data are released. (Raymond V. Tamasi, 1/22)

Stat: Taking A Grassroots Approach To Fighting The Opioid Epidemic
A group of organizations including the Washington state chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, the Washington State Medical Association, and the Washington State Hospital Association — as well as the state’s hospitals — were given the responsibility of finding their own way to lower emergency care for the highest users of emergency room care, 48 percent of whom had substance abuse problems. We launched the ER is for Emergencies program in the summer of 2012. Within just 12 months it had reduced emergency department visits by nearly 11 percent. (Hamad Husainy, 1/19)

Bloomberg: Why Hospitals Aren't In The Drug Business
Companies tend to pursue vertical integration for the same reasons that these hospitals are: because they are fed up with high prices and short supplies of some key input. They figure that if they got into the business, they’d produce as much as was needed, and eliminate all the grotesque profits their suppliers are enjoying -- or better yet, capture those profits for themselves. Rarely do they seem to stop to ask the reasons for the high prices and the scarcity, or to wonder whether those reasons will magically go away once they own their suppliers ... It’s understandable if hospitals and patients don’t really care why the prices are going up. But it does matter, because the reasons for the price increase tell us a lot about how successful this hospital-led effort is apt to be. (Megan McArdle, 1/19)

Chicago Tribune: How To Win Friends And Not Give Influenza To People
Every boss, every co-worker, every sane person should deliver the same message to flu sufferers: You aren’t that important. We can get along for a few days without you. Or consider this: If you infect your office mates, you’ll be the one doing their work when you’re back and they’re still home in bed, suffering and blaming you. (1/20)

Stat: AIDS Activist Mathilde Krim Saved My Life
Mathilde Krim, an indefatigable fighter against the virus that causes AIDS and a stalwart champion of those infected with it, died this week at age 91. Her death is a loss for the HIV/AIDS community, and for me personally. Krim saved my life — although not exactly in a way I could have imagined — and it was more than a decade before I could tell her my story and thank her on behalf of so many others. (Steven Petrow, 1/19)

Lexington Herald Leader: Get Insurers Out Of Doctor-Patient Relationship
Patrick T. Padgett, executive vice president of the Kentucky Medical Association, made several valid points in his commentary, “Patients shouldn’t have to pay for Anthem’s poor business decisions.”Another way to say this is, “Patients and their physicians should have more control over their health-care decisions.” (Molly Rutherford, 1/19)

The Washington Post: The Bad Flu Season Has Revealed A Dangerous Problem With Our Medical Supply Chain
Flu season in the United States typically peaks in February, but this year’s outbreak is already one of the worst on record. As of Jan. 6, 20 children have died of influenza, and overall mortality caused by the flu is already double that of last year’s. One reason the flu is so severe this season is that the dominant strain is H3N2, which has an impressive ability to mutate and is particularly aggressive against Americans over 50. (Morten Wendelbo and Christine Crudo Blackburn, 1/21)

Los Angeles Times: Fearing A Rebuff In Court, Lead Paint Companies Are Trying To Stick Taxpayers With Their Cleanup Bill
Three big paint companies must be terrified that they are going to be thrown for a big loss by the California Supreme Court — a loss worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them. We know this because the companies are spending millions to push a ballot measure that would nullify, as though by the back door, the judgment being considered by the court. You wouldn't know it by reading the text of the proposed initiative; you have to read between the lines. To grasp the true intent of the measure, you'd have to know that in 2014, in a lawsuit brought by 10 California cities and counties, a state judge ordered the three former manufacturers of lead paint — Conagra, NL Industries and Sherwin-Williams — to spend $1.15 billion to abate the dangers from that paint still in California homes. (Michael Hiltzik, 1/18)

Cleveland Plain Dealer: Fentanyl-Laced Cocaine Is Ohio's Newest Killer - But We Can Combat This Scourge
Fentanyl has started killing cocaine users in Ohio at a faster pace than the death toll for heroin. ...The shift in who's dying and what drug is carrying fentanyl or one of its many variants has gone unnoticed in Ohio's massive response to drug overdoses, which erroneously treats fentanyl as super-strong heroin. It is not. (Dennis Cauchon, 1/19)

The Wall Street Journal: Single-Payer Health Care Isn’t Worth Waiting
When Brian Day opened the Cambie Surgery Centre in 1996, he had a simple goal. Dr. Day, an orthopedic surgeon from Vancouver, British Columbia, wanted to provide timely, state-of-the-art medical care to Canadians who were unwilling to wait months—even years—for surgery they needed. Canada’s single-payer health-care system, known as Medicare, is notoriously sluggish. But private clinics like Cambie are prohibited from charging most patients for operations that public hospitals provide free. Dr. Day is challenging that prohibition before the provincial Supreme Court. If it rules in his favor, it could alter the future of Canadian health care. (Sally Pipes, 1/21)

The Wall Street Journal: How To Save Football Players’ Brains
Football is entertaining to watch, but it’s a violent collision sport that causes the majority of traumatic brain injuries in athletes. During a high-school season, one study finds, nearly 1 in 5 players on any given team will suffer a concussion. Many will suffer more than one. ... If opposing linemen simply started each play upright, in a knees-bent “ready” position, with their hands in front of them, it would nearly guarantee that their hands and arms, rather than their heads, would be the first body parts in contact. (Paul S. Auerbach, 1/19)

San Antonio Press-Express: Flawed Data Undermining Efforts To Reduce Pregnancy Related Deaths
Texas has a big problem with a high number of pregnancy-related deaths and that problem just got bigger. Researchers have concluded the data being used to document cases of women dying during pregnancy, in childbirth or in the six weeks following a child’s birth is so bad it undermines efforts to develop an effective prevention program. (1/19)