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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Constant Reader who wrote (192364)	7/20/2006 8:38:17 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

How many people are going to the State Regulator for information no docs? What about consumer reviews of docs like consumer reviews of restaurants and hotels? What regulation of profit? The Pharmas are the ones pushing for extended patent protection and they prevented, in the Medicare bill fiasco, the government from negotiating bulk prices from them. I'm not sure what happened with Vioxx but I thought that part of the problem was Pharma's buying of the FDA and pushing things through that should not have been. The other part of the problem with Pharma is that it wishes to produce things that provide longterm protected revenue which apparently does not include things like antibiotics. Pricing is based on supply and demand. The first step is getting Pharma out of Government. They're lobbying like crazy and getting, fairly cheaply, what they want. Look who rammed through the Medicare bill and where he is now...and what he's making. There is no such thing as a free market in this world. In fact, I would argue that it is STRONG REGULATION that permits even a partially free market to operate. We have government-run streets, government-run military, government-run lots of things. The government IS JUST US. When it's not working, it means that it needs a change BY US to work better.

To: Constant Reader who wrote (192364)	7/20/2006 9:53:15 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

Drug Errors Harm 1.5 Million A Year WASHINGTON, July 20, 2006(CBS/AP) More than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by drug errors in hospitals, nursing homes and doctor's offices, a count that doesn't even estimate patients' own medication mix-ups, says a report that calls for major steps to increase patient safety. Topping that list: All prescriptions should be written electronically by 2010, the Institute of Medicine said. At least a quarter of all medication-related injuries are preventable, the institute concluded in the report it released Thursday. Perhaps the most stunning finding of the report was that, on average, a hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day — despite intense efforts to improve hospital care in the six years since the institute began focusing attention on medical mistakes of all kinds. The new probe couldn't say how many victims of drug errors die. A 1999 estimate put the number of deaths — conservatively — at 7,000 a year. Also unknown is how many of the injuries are serious. But a preventable drug error can add more than $5,800 to the hospital bill of a single patient. Assuming that hospitals commit 400,000 preventable drug errors each year, that's $3.5 billion — not counting lost productivity and other costs — from hospitals alone, the report concluded. "The numbers are big. The injuries are big. This is a problem, it's serious and it continues," said report co-author Michael Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices..... cbsnews.com