Americans broadly consent to funding clinical research because they believe in the promise of medical research. But people support scientific work only if they trust that it serves societal interests, respects patient dignity and operates with guardrails.
One thing about Covid-19 is clear: We don't fully understand its severity and transmission. At various turns, we've both underestimated and overestimated the virus.
What makes the EpiPen unique is its delivery vehicle - an auto-injector that's packaged in a convenient, pen-like device. The product's key attribute is its ability to reliably deliver accurate doses of the essential medicine.
Why do physicians prescribe powerful antibiotics? Generally not because our patients ask for them. Most people who come in with a sore throat would be just as happy leaving my office with a prescription for Chloraseptic as clarithromycin.
Obamacare's costly regulations mean that the mix of people who sign up are tending to be older and sicker. Many young and otherwise healthy individuals continue to be priced out of the exchanges, even after the benefit of federal subsidies are baked into their costs.
Even with all its political bells and whistles, the Obamacare plans increasingly resemble Medicaid in terms of networks and drug lists.
Biologics must be grown in living systems - fermented, for example, in large vats of bacteria cells. This makes them hard to replicate. For decades, biologics weren't subject to competition from copycat generic medicines, even once patents and exclusivities had lapsed on originals.
Obamacare mandates a largely uniform structure and set of benefits and insurance design across the entire country. It leaves consumers with very little real choice of the health benefits they want.
There's instinctual discomfort about using evidence of past immunity as a factor for decisions about health, work or even questions like whether it's safe to visit someone in a nursing home. But there are ways to deploy immunity information to help us understand our own health status and keep us safer from Covid, without surrendering privacy.
One of the noxious features of Obamacare was its forced march into a single, federally designed package of health benefits.
Creative destruction is an increasingly prominent feature of modern medical practice.
Among the most common reasons why people come to an emergency room are bouts of heart failure or pneumonia. Sometimes they have a touch of both.
Science offers the chance to cure debilitating and once-intractable disorders like hemophilia and sickle cell disease. But we need to make sure the ability to access these therapies, or the risk that someone can be locked out of them, doesn't widen gaps between the rich and poor.
The key to the generic-drug economic model is to keep entry prices low enough to attract multiple competitors.
Health-assessment software such as CareEvolution's 'Safer Covid' tool can combine multiple health factors to evaluate a person's total risk of contracting Covid or suffering a bad outcome.
More government control of doctors and their reimbursement schemes will only create more problems.
The first nation to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 could have an economic advantage as well as a tremendous public-health achievement. Doses will be limited initially as suppliers ramp up, and a country will focus on inoculating most of its own population first.
One of the biggest factors fueling the angst over drug prices in the U.S. is that some older medicines that should be sold cheaply as generics are still priced very high, often owing to a dwindling number of generic competitors and the rising cost of producing these drugs.
A major part of the conservative plans to reform Medicaid turn on the assumption that states will be better able to manage the program, and deliver its benefits, free from all the intrusive regulation that Washington imposes.
From West Nile to swine flu to Ebola to the global outbreak of dengue fever, the capacity to deal with threats like Zika must be designed into our preparedness posture.
