Pharmaceutical Industry

Alan Cropsey should be a trial lawyer's worst nightmare. A former schoolteacher and current state senator in Michigan, Cropsey is a devout evangelical Christian and conservative Republican who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and doesn't lose elections. In his 25-year career, he's done two separate stints in both chambers of the state legislature, hung out his shingle in private practice, and was Michigan field director for the Republican Majority Issues Committee, a PAC affiliated with Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). "I'm driven,"… more

With the pharmaceutical industry spending around $3 billion a year advertising its products directly to consumers, you can't open a magazine, watch television or read a newspaper without stumbling over a pitch for this or that drug. So when an editor first alerted me to a series of ads being run by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, I assumed it was just more of the same. Each ad shows a photo of an actual cancer patient, under headlines such as, "Stunning… more

New America's Jacob Hacker and Laurie Rubiner discuss the political battle over public and private social benefits.

Today we remember Medicare's establishment in July 1965 as a ringing affirmation of the ideal of social insurance. Less well remembered is how close Washington came to creating a very different system. Not long before Medicare's passage, the Kennedy administration seemed on the verge of a compromise with Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York. Senator Javits and his allies wanted to give private insurance a leading place in the new program so government could play a smaller… more

Last week, when Senate leaders announced they had agreed upon a bipartisan compromise for Medicare reform, Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that the new proposal "meets all of the president's principles that have been laid out to date." Nothing could be further from the truth. When George W. Bush unveiled his vision for Medicare reform during January's State of the Union address, he was intent upon transforming it from a government-run insurance program into a system of competing private insurance… more

To anybody who has followed the course of biomedical science over the last two decades, the progress being made in understanding severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) appears nothing short of miraculous. SARS emerged as a global health threat in March, and now, just two months later, scientists have isolated the virus causing the disease and published a complete map of the pathogen's genes. By comparison, the sequencing of the human genome, an admittedly larger task, has taken more than a… more

One of the central tenets of modern medicine is that the earlier your doctor can catch a disease, the better. This has proved a brilliant strategy for several conditions. Detecting high blood pressure, for example, and treating it can cut a patient's risk of stroke by a third and the chances of heart disease by 20 percent. Identifying patients with the first signs of diabetes and controlling their blood sugar can help significantly reduce the chances of cardiovascular disease, kidney… more

Federal health officials have been doing a lot of bioterrorism planning lately. Last month they released a 100-page manual telling states in exacting detail how to vaccinate the entire country in six days in the event of a smallpox outbreak -- right down to instructions for providing enough bathroom facilities for waiting vaccinees. This month they've added a new plan for vaccinating citizens before a smallpox outbreak. The president's top bioterrorism advisers told reporters earlier this month that they want… more

Word of the hidden epidemic began spreading in the spring of 2001. Local newscasts around the country reported that as many as 10 million Americans suffered from an unrecognized disease. Viewers were urged to watch for the symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, nausea, diarrhea, and sweating, among others. Many of the segments featured sound bites from Sonja Burkett, a patient who'd finally received treatment after two years trapped at home by the illness, and from Dr.… more

At one end of the long conference table sat the lawyer, a tall man with silver-and-black hair, prominent cheekbones and a Baltimore accent, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and white pin-stripe shirt with monogrammed cuffs. The others seated at the table wore lightweight dresses, bluejeans, overalls, cowboy boots and trucker caps. Their faces were somber and expectant. Some had driven hundreds of miles to Tulsa to be here.

The lawyer began the meeting with two questions. "Why did you… more