Viewpoints: Pharma Industry Needs To Stop Hiding In The Shade

The Sacramento Bee: The Bill Pharma Wants To Bottle Up
Few pocketbook issues are as widespread or as hard to fathom as the soaring cost of prescription drugs. In the past five years, prices for the nation’s 10 top selling medications – for high cholesterol, arthritis, diabetes, depression and other common conditions – have shot up 50 percent, 100 percent and even higher. In the last year alone, spending on prescription medication is up 12 percent, to a national total of some $425 billion. Why? Are we sicker? Are drug ingredients scarcer? Are we all just being ripped off?Enter Senate Bill 1010, up Thursday in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. A sunshine bill, it doesn’t set prices or raise taxes; it just demands a few fundamental, and extremely relevant, facts. (8/10)

Los Angeles Times: It's Time For The Government To Play Hardball With Those Whining Obamacare Insurers
It’s easily forgotten that Congress and the Obama administration did the health insurance industry an enormous favor in enacting the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Several favors, in fact. They placed commercial insurers at the center of Obamacare, giving them most of the responsibility for covering enrollees—and therefore access to an army of new customers. They left in place private insurers’ access to the immense Medicaid pool via Medicaid managed care. They killed the public option, which would have provided a nonprofit counterweight to private insurers, hopefully goading the latter into maintaining competitive pricing and customer service. (Michael Hiltzik, 8/9)

Los Angeles Times: Sleek Olympic Athletes Shame Flabby American Desk Jockeys
On the plus side, the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are providing a nice distraction from the relentless 2016 presidential campaign that has now been with us for two long summers and all the time in between. Not only are the athletes wowing us with their always amazing feats of skill and strength, but there is an edifying moral example being set by the drug-free competitors who are shaming the few among them who have been found guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs. On the minus side, though, there is this: The physical perfection of all these gymnasts and runners and swimmers and soccer players presents a stark contrast to our own all-American summer bodies. (David Horsey, 8/10)

The Sacramento Bee: New Vaccine Law Making Schools Safer By Re-Establishing Community Immunity
This August marks the first school year that children starting school must have required vaccines unless they have a medical exemption from a physician. The number of children without the required vaccines at school enrollment had skyrocketed by 337 percent since 2000, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable serious diseases such as measles. The new law is already having an impact. Thanks to greater public awareness, the rate of unvaccinated children in our state is already changing for the better. The vaccination rate for kindergartners was up 2.5 percentage points over 2014. And with implementation of the new law, it is my hope and expectation that the immunization rate will climb even higher over the next several years to re-establish the community immunity California previously enjoyed. (Richard Pan, 8/5)

Los Angeles Times: Arianna Huffington Wants To Sell Health Advice And Products. Science Help Us
Arianna Huffington got very rich off writers working for free and by providing a platform for quacks to push dubious medical advice, including dangerous amounts of anti-vaccination nonsense. Now, she’s leaving the Huffington Post and apparently taking the worst of it with her to her new start up, Thrive Global, a “corporate and consumer well-being and productivity platform.” Translating start up-talk into communicable English can be a challenge even for readers at the 10th-grade level, but whatever it is that Thrive ends up doing, know that Huffington will garner a lot of money doing it. This write-up on Thrive from Business Insider tries to pin down exactly what Huffington plans on doing beyond preaching platitudes about wellness and health to corporate HR types worried about worker burnout. (Paul Thornton, 8/11)

Fresno Bee: Unconscionable Drug Price Hikes Hurt Fresno And All Of California 
In Fresno County, nearly half our population is enrolled in Medi-Cal, and Medi-Cal is one of the programs that’s been hit hardest by out-of-control prescription price spikes. California’s 2016-17 budget allocates nearly $1 billion to cover the cost of outrageously expensive Hepatitis C treatments for Medi-Cal enrollees. That’s the cost of just one drug in just one program. (Smita Rouillard, 8/9)

The New York Times: How Common Procedures Became 20 Percent Cheaper For Many Californians
At a time when health care spending seems only to go up, an initiative in California has slashed the prices of many common procedures. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) started paying hospitals differently for 450,000 of its members beginning in 2011. It set a maximum contribution it would make toward what a hospital was paid for knee and hip replacement surgery, colonoscopies, cataract removal surgery and several other elective procedures. Under the new approach, called reference pricing, patients who wished to get a procedure at a higher-priced hospital paid the difference themselves. (Austin Frakt, 8/8)

Mercury News: Alzheimer's Patients Need More Options, Funding
It's a grim statistic: As our population ages, the number of individuals afflicted with Alzheimer's disease is expected to double in the next 15 years. While many of us need help as we get older, care options for those afflicted with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia are much more limited and constrained even further by health insurance rules that favor medicalized care over supportive programs that might actually lessen the need for medical intervention.This was the situation my family and I faced when my beloved wife Nancy was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. ( John Ottoboni, 8/11)

Contra Costa Times: Bill Empowers Whistleblowers On Safety Issue
Going to work as a registered nurse at Alameda County's John George Psychiatric Hospital makes me proud -- I'm passionate about extending the human right of compassionate care to patients who are too often on the fringes of society. But sometimes, stepping into the hospital also makes me afraid, because I know my safety isn't a high priority for hospital administrators. By voting for AB 2835 by Assemblyman Jim Cooper, Bay Area legislators can help ensure that my colleagues and I who dedicate ourselves to public service have the information we need to stay safe, starting on day one. Health care workers face extremely high levels of violence on the job, including physical, emotional, sexual and verbal assaults. (Rachel Odes, 8/9)

Mercury News: Silicon Valley's Fascination With A Fountain Of Youth
Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor behind Facebook and co-founder of PayPal, recently made headlines for his reported personal and professional interest in whether blood transfusions from younger people can improve and even extend life for older people. Ewww. Vampire alert. Ghoulish and ethically questionable as it may seem, Thiel's interest in young blood and other life extension gambits shouldn't come as a surprise. (Michelle Quinn, 8/9)