Taxing Cigarettes Reduces Heart Disease

Hardball in the Information Age
The House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the USPSTF mammography guidelines next week. The press announcement went out a few minutes ago. To find out who was slated to speak, I googled the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Guess who's website topped the first two Google listings? The Republican Party's page on the website. For the record, the subcommittee on Health, chaired by Frank Pallone of N.J., hasn't yet posted who will speak

Mammograms and the Corporate Breast
(The following is reprinted from the Bioethics Forum) By Adriane Fugh-Berman and Alicia Bell The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) would seem as unlikely a target for attack as Santa's elves. For a quarter-century, this squeaky-clean, underappreciated group of doctors and nurses who are specialists in preventive medicine has toiled away in obscurity in the selfless service of public health. Appointed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the task force panel is independent and does not take cos

Lessons from Vioxx
In September 2004, Merck voluntarily withdrew Vioxx (rofecoxib) from the world market after an interim safety analysis showed that Vioxx was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events.  After the APPROVe trial was released in November 2004, Merck's CEO testified before a U.S. Senate committee that "until data from [APPROVe] . . . the combined data from randomized controlled clinical trials showed no difference in confirmed cardiovascular event rates between Vioxx and placebo."&

A Nudge for Wellness
The Senate devoted long sections of its 2,074-page health care reform bill to promoting wellness, both in the Medicare and Medicaid populations and among the privately insured. The bill establishes demonstration wellness projects in government programs and asks all insurers to report on what they do to promote better health. And, in what at first blush looks like a bold use of economic incentives, the bill permits employer-based insurance plans to award premium discounts of up to 30 percent to plan beneficiaries who participate in smoking cessation, stress management, physical fitness, nutrition, weight management, and heart disease and diabetes prevention programs as long as the

Repeat After Me: Early Detection Via Screening Does Not Equal Prevention
Kevin Sack of the New York Times's otherwise informative article on how the "Screening Debate Reveals Culture Clash in Medicine" concludes on a clunker of a note. After exploring the debate over the efficacy of mammography and cervical cancer screening, he concludes with a "kicker quote" (journalistic parlance for the last word, which usually reveals what the reporter is thinking) from Rutgers University's Louis Russell, who is renowned for arguing (falsely at times in my view) that prevention doesn't save money. Guess what? Screening isn't prevention. Screening i