This is just the beginning, folks…
Just the beginning.
Jeez. Lighten up! Isn’t this what power and influence are for?
Price has the perfect name for an obvious crook.
Price: Are you calling me a grifter? Well, that’s Doctor Grifter to you.
This Doctor is more of a witch doctor than an actual practitioner. It seems to me that all he cares about is $$$, not so much about patients. That MO appears to have been his style as a Congressman.He was all ears for his donors, not so much for the average person in his district. I don’t think we need a second opinion on his serving as Secretary of HHS - he is a scoundrel. No more scoundrels in the cabinet !
Trump and Price both grifters.
think Tom Price is an ass of the highest order & would not trust him any further than I could throw a Buick.
however I do become curious when a “study” is mentioned - but there is not real citation - no link.
So, it would seem that this is the study originally published in the journal Clinical Therapeutics in 2009:
http://www.clinicaltherapeutics.com/article/S0149-2918(09)00094-0/abstract
This was a rather poor “study” - it may be suggestive of different things - but it “proved” nothing - it certainly did not make any arguments for the drug in question - it certainly could not support any claims of efficacy.
But it is so weak & scientifically lacking that the stated criticisms of the drug cannot really be supported by this work -
This was a “retrospective cohort study” - in this case meaning “electronic data on outpatient prescriptions, comorbidity, and other heart failure risk factors were analyzed in veterans with heart failure”
- they did not follow any patients prospectively - they did a “study” of patient records
Retrospective studies can be (but are not automatically) seriously flawed - there are often inconsistencies - and frequently data captured in the past - may have been captured in variable ways and data verification is often weak.
Note that the authors acknowledge the limitations of the study in the conclusion:
Conclusions:
In this population of veterans with heart failure, H-ISDN prescription was not associated with significant reductions in mortality or hospitalization in any of the subgroups defined by race/ethnicity and time of initiation of H-ISDN analyzed compared with the group that did not receive H-ISDN.
It is possible, or even likely, that unmeasured differences in important risk factors—particularly heart failure severity and left ventricular dysfunction—between the group that received H-ISDN and the one that did not, masked a beneficial effect of H-ISDN.
Therefore, our conclusions must be regarded as hypothesis generating and need to be tested in subsequent randomized trial(s).
Now, should the study have been pulled? no
does the study definitively prove that the drug is crap? no - - it is basically "hypothesis generating"
Should the drug company have shut up and spent the money to conduct a prospective randomized controlled study in a genuine scientific manner? Hell yes
- here’s where trust of Price goes out the window - A physician should be able to look at this and instantly see the questionable aspects - but should have said - do the better & more scientific study - prove that your product is effective - the study raised questions - go find the answers -
Can you imagine the brouhaha if any of this involved HRC instead of a GOP congressman? NYT, CNN, NBC (Todd would think he’d died and gone to heaven), FOX, all the other major media outlets would be all over it for weeks and lynch mobs would be roaming the streets.
But since it’s Price, how much press do you think this is going to get outside of TPM and MSNBC? There’ll be an article or two (this article says CNN and WSJ (of all outlets), each did a story on one of the many corrupt incidents), then nada. Hope I’m wrong though.
Tom Price regards national healthcare system the same way he viewed his private practice and his subsequent legislative career - as a way to make money. He is a complete mercenary and he appears to have gotten the Hippocratic oath absolutely backwards.
Is there a single MD in Congress who is worth a damn?
I’m fascinated by the notion that studies that haven’t been refuted by subsequent work have an expiration date.
The two studies with wildly differing results need to be examined carefully and reconciled. It looks like one of them is fracked up somehow.
@hayduke2017–Like this:
@jinnj–Great analysis. And you are correct here: “here’s where trust of Price goes out the window - A physician should be able to look at this and instantly see the questionable aspects - but should have said - do the better & more scientific study - prove that your product is effective - the study raised questions - go find the answers.”
Items 9 and 13 from The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism are now hard at work:
-
Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
-
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Foxes are burning the henhouse and taking the farmer’s daughter hostage. “Forget the henhouse,” say the foxes. “We want turkey!” The pigs are cheering now, but they’ll be first in line to bitch when the barn starts to reek of fuel oil.
1/20/2017 - The day that ethical behavior died in Federal Governance.
Tom Price is an orthopedic surgeon. He’s about as qualified to evaluate a heart medication study as Donald Trump is. The average orthopedic surgeon is aware of the fact that heart medications exist, but not much more.
Price has maintained that he abided by the law and took no legislative action for personal profit.
This may well be a true statement. But it is not what he is accused of doing. He is accused of taking person action for personal profit on the basis of his knowledge of legislative actions that would be taken. That’s insider trading, Mr. Price.
@dave48: You’re too hard on Tom Price, Medical Deity. An orthopedic surgeon ought to know enough to be able to distinguish between a prospective trial and a retrospective study and to be able to identify good and bad examples of each. As retrospective studies go, this one isn’t awful, and that is about the best that can be said for it. (Please note I’m not saying that the Medical Deity in question can make the discernment, merely that he should be able to make it.)
he’s a killer.