News & Features

December, 2007

December edition of M.D. Pharmacy's monthly newsletter. Articles regarding your medications, their safety, and the politics behind the price you pay for them. Please share this with your neighbors.

Insurance companies getting interest–free billions of dollars of Medicare money.

UnitedHealth, Humana and Wellpoint and scores of other benefit managers owe Billions of dollars that should have been refunded to Medicare for over-payments they received from Medicare to manage the Medicare Part D plans. The combined bounty held by the insurance companies' totals $4.4 Billion dollars which Medicare had funded, but was never paid out as benefits by the insurance companies. Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson said in a recent report that Medicare left insurers free to use the money because it did not collect interim repayments. Representative Pete Stark, who serves as chairman of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee, said that UnitedHealth and scores of other insurance companies were getting "multi-billion dollar zero-interest loans from Medicare." Rep. Stark is leading the efforts in Congress to scale back Medicare's reliance on private insurers, saying of the insurance companies, "That's not advocating for prudent use of taxpayer dollars". Some of the other culprits with the largest repayment obligations are Coventry Health which owes $390 million and Independence Blue Cross with $230 million. Spokesmen for UnitedHealth and Humana did not offer comments on the findings.

Health care excuses.

Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times notes in a column for the Times, "The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured. You might think that these facts would make the case for major reform of America's health care system, including learning from other countries experience." Instead however, apologists for the status quo offer only a barrage of excuses for our system's miserable performance. Recently President Bush himself said publicly that people in America have access to health care. "After all, you just go to an emergency room", a statement which was mocked for its cluelessness, yet many other politicians agree and seem equally clueless. The health insurance establishment also tells us that there really aren't that manyuninsured Americans, missing the point that there are 47million people without insurance, and often postpone needed medical care because of the cost. They also try to blame the unhealthy diet of most Americans, overeating and teenage sex, not the huge overhead of America's private health insurance companies. But ask yourself why, after spending 6 times more on healthcare administration than other advanced countries we still have lower life expectancy than Britain, Canada or France. The report of the McKinsey Global Institute says that diseases that are associated with obesity and other lifestyle-related related problems play, at most, a minor role in the high U.S. health care costs. Then, as a last resort they list "socialized medicine" as something horrid and to be avoided. Scare tactics aside, the reality is that the best foreign health care systems, especially those of France and Germany, do as well or better than the U.S. system on every dimension, while costing far less money.

I for one, would rather rely on a non-profit single payer plan, (yes, run by the government, not unlike our very capable Medicare system) and which allows my doctor to practice medicine, than having my health care in the hands of greedy "benefit managers" and the obscenely profitable insurance companies who habitually make their profits by denying good health care to Americans.

Statins help prevent heart attack.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs (the statins) help prevent heart attacks for at least a decade after people stop taking them. The study participants were middle-aged men who had never had a heart attack, but who had a very high level of LDL, the "bad" cholesterol. The researchers wrote that statin's protective effect was probably because existing plaque was stabilized, and the progression of coronary artery disease was slowed.

Depression drugs increase GI (gastrointestinal) bleeding risk.

The study found that patients taking certain antidepressant drugs (SSRI's) when combined with a broad range of anti-inflammatory drugs such as Aleve, aspirin, and Celebrex increase the risk of GI bleeding is more than 600% higher.

The pharmacists and staff at M.D. Pharmacy, your neighborhood pharmacy.

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