Shannon Brownlee: All Publications, Events and Press

Shannon Brownlee in the Indianapolis Star | 'One Drug, Many Uses. Good idea?'

Communications — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:34:00 -0400

New America in the News:

..."I think the question is, should one drug compound do so much?" said Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

"This is a drug that may have a really serious side effect called suicide," Brownlee said. "Don't we have other drugs available that are safer and just as effective for such things as the management of chronic knee and low back pain?"... LINK

Shannon Brownlee in Ledger-Inquirer | 'What's Behind Medical Costs?'

Communications — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:30:00 -0400

New America in the News:

When campaigning for the presidency was hot and heavy, the hopefuls constantly reminded us of the high cost of health care. If we are to believe what we are told, the uninsured are making health care costs for the rest of us skyrocket.

Not so, according to Shannon Brownlee. The only people currently using the health care system are those who have insurance. So, if more people have insurance, more people will get health care treatment, she said.

In April, Brownlee spoke at a health and medical news conference, the Gnat Line News Briefing, for journalists. This is an annual gathering in Cordele, Ga., presented by the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She talked about medical care and treatment and how consumers don't always get what they think they're paying for... LINK

Shannon Brownlee in Chicago Tribune | 'High Cost of Unnecessary Treatment'

Communications — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:41:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...[T]he best here is medical journalist Shannon Brownlee's argument that health care is screwed up not because we don't ration care like Canada; or that malpractice lawsuits are to blame; or that absurd administrative costs raise insurance costs; or that consumers don't shop wisely since we often don't pay out of pocket.

No, she contends that over-treatment is to blame not only for high costs but for often making us more sick, suggesting we spend $500 billion a year on unnecessary care...LINK

Shannon Brownlee in Telegraph-Journal | 'Are There Too Many Doctors?'

Communications — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:17:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...Writing in the December, 2007 Atlantic Monthly, Medical journalist Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer (Bloomsbury Press 2007), notes that U.S. medical schools are planning to boost the number of new doctors being graduated annually by 30 per cent from 2002 levels over the next eight years...

Brownlee says the problematical issues are essentially two: new physicians tend to congregate in affluent communities offering a "high quality of life," in other words, places already served by large physician populations, leaving poor and rural venues short of doctors or not served at all continuing to go begging.

Secondly, medical schools are graduating greater numbers of specialists, but substantially fewer primary-care physicians. In the U.S., says Brownlee, "between 1997 and 2005, the number of... medical graduates entering family-practice residencies fell by 50 per cent..." LINK

Shannon Brownlee in U.S. News & World Report | 'A Different Way of Ranking Hospitals'

Communications — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:34:00 -0400

New America in the News:
...[The ratings] seem to me less a consumer tool than a prod to the public consciousness. They send a message of great and expensive imbalance, that part of our national healthcare problem, as Shannon Brownlee writes in her recent book, Overtreated, is the enormous weight of care that is simply unnecessary. LINK

Stealth Marketers

Ron Tang — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:11:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, devoted listeners of National Public Radio were treated to an episode of the award-winning radio series The Infinite Mind called "Prozac Nation: Revisited." The segment featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. In their considered opinions, all four said that worries about the drugs have been overblown.

The radio show, which was broadcast nationwide and paid for in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had the air of quiet, authoritative credibility. Host Dr. Fred Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of… more

Shannon Brownlee in San Jose Mercury News | UCSC Grad Winning Kudos for 'Overtreated'

Communications — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:33:00 -0400

New America in the News:

San Jose Mercury News | UCSC Grad Winning Kudos for 'Overtreated', A Health Care System Critique

Spending more on health care can be bad for our health, according to Shannon Brownlee, an award-winning medical journalist and UC Santa Cruz graduate who has earned widespread kudos for her book about the nation's sprawling health care system.

In "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer," Brownlee challenges common medical practices. She depicts an uneven delivery of medical services throughout the country that routinely makes unjustified costly promises without the science to back them up.

"There is remarkably little evidence to back up what physicians do," Brownlee said recently from her home in Maryland.

Named No. 1 Economics Book of 2007 by The New York Times, "Overtreated" has drawn the praise for its solution-oriented critique of U.S. health care delivery. It's also drawn fire. . .

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Ron Tang — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:09:00 -0400

Do you want to Google your genes or peer into your future risks of heart disease or cancer? Now you can, according to direct to consumer testing companies. Gone are the days when genetic testing was limited to doctors ordering tests for rare, but prognostically potent, single gene disorders such as Huntington’s disease, Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, or cystic fibrosis. Thanks to an explosion of newly discovered single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips), companies are marketing genetic tests for traits ranging from the mundane -- eye colour and wet ear wax -- to serious conditions such as Crohn’s disease and… more

Big Pharma's Golden Eggs

Ron Tang — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:25:00 -0400

Once upon a time there was an industry called pharma that was interested in doing well and doing good. Run by doctors and chemists, drug companies employed battalions of researchers whose scientific efforts resulted by mid-century in a flood of life-saving drugs, including antibiotics, vaccines, tranquilizers, antihistamines and steroids. As George Merck, president of the company founded by his father, put it in 1950, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow... "

And how. Today, of course, drug companies are hugely profitable enterprises and the darlings of both… more

Let's Stop Running Scared

Ron Tang — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:49:00 -0400

Felt a little short of breath the other day, walking up a hill. Uh-oh. A nugget of worry lodged for a moment in my mind. At 50-something, I'm in decent enough shape. I don't smoke. I walk several miles most days, and I can still beat my 40-something friend at tennis. Not exactly a candidate for a heart attack. But still. I've read all those stories about women like me, the ones with no risk factors for cardiac disease who were suddenly hit with an attack.

Maybe you've had the same worries -- wondered whether some sharp little twinge was heartburn… more

Shannon Brownlee, Jacob Hacker in Chrisitan Science Monitor | 'Arguments for a National Healthcare System'

Communications — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:52:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Arguments Mount for a National Healthcare System (Christian Science Monitor)

...In the current campaign season, Senator McCain calls for dozens of reforms to bring down costs and make expenditures more effective in health results. And he states, "we can and must provide access to healthcare for all our citizens." His proposals, though, don't fully embrace the uninsured.

Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the centrist New America Foundation, charges that McCain is "so wedded to the free market that he fails to recognize that there has been market failure" in the healthcare industry.

Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are more ambitious in their proposed reforms than McCain. They both promise, if elected, to provide guaranteed, affordable care for all Americans.

Both of their proposals have taken key elements from a plan of Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Professor Hacker's template, outlined in an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper, notes: "America's $2.2 trillion-a-year medical complex is enormously wasteful, ill-targeted, inefficient, and unfair. The best medical care is extremely good, but the Rube Goldberg system through which that care is financed is extremely bad – and falling apart." He calls the runaway costs a "grave threat" to the security of family finances and to corporate America's bottom line.

The Hacker plan combines the current employer-based system with a new federally administered insurance pool similar to Medicare, the popular program for older Americans. This new pool would be funded by premiums and copays charged to individuals and employers who sign up, as well as government subsidies. Individuals would automatically be enrolled, either at work or when they seek care. Premiums would be capped, with subsidies for lower-income families. ...

Hacker was delighted last month when an analysis of his plan by the Lewis Group, a nonpartisan consulting group, held that his proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. Indeed, it would save more than $1 trillion over 10 years, the report held.

None of the leading presidential candidates call for a single-payer system, as in Canada. That may be in part political expediency, considering what is possible. Republicans sometimes call Democrat health plans "socialized medicine." ...

Hacker doubts if Americans would go "in one fell swoop" for a single-payer system where individuals choose their own doctors, but government pays the bill. ...

Canada, says Ms. Brownlee, author of a new book, "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer," spends about 16 percent of every dollar on administrative costs.

An Untold Story?

Ron Tang — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

New generation antidepressants aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. That seems to be the central message in the meta-analysis published this week by Irving Kirsch and colleagues in PLoS Medicine,[1] and it was this message that made the headlines. Kirsch’s conclusion follows on the heels of similar studies showing that statins are useful in only a small subset of patients taking the drugs[2] and earlier studies finding that the safety and performance of cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX 2) inhibitors were worse than they first seemed.[3] All of which further reinforces previous criticisms that regulators in the United Kingdom and the United… more

Price Check

Ron Tang — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

For American progressives, it's hard to name a more pressing -- or long-awaited -- goal than achieving universal health coverage. Today, prospects for that goal seem better than they have in years, if not for the fact that the Democratic presidential hopefuls are bickering over the details of how to do it.

But obsessing over universal coverage has obscured a far more complex and worrisome problem in our healthcare system, and that is the question of costs.

The United States, as we all know by now, spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country on the planet, and by a… more

Shannon Brownlee on WBUR Boston Radio | 'Health Care Costs'

Communications — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:15:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Real Issues: Health Care Costs (On Point/WBUR Boston Radio)

Listen to the online audio from the show featuring Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. ...

There are issues that get a big workout on the presidential campaign trail: big headlines, big applause lines. And there are a raft of really big issues that barely get touched: from defense spending, to American deficits, to the bottom line of American health care -- health care costs. Other nations spend less and live longer. American health care spending has doubled in the last decade, but the care's not twice as good. ...

Shannon Brownlee in Fortune Online | 'Cholesterol skeptics have their day'

Communications — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Cholesterol skeptics have their day (Fortune)

"There's a mountain of evidence that shows that people who have financial relationships with industry produce biased research and come up with biased recommendations for treatment," notes Shannon Brownlee, author of "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer". Brownlee points out, as has been widely reported, that of the nine medical experts who devised the national cholesterol guidelines, six had received research grants, speaking honoraria, or consulting fees from at least three of the five companies that produce brand-name statins.

Shannon Brownlee in Baltimore Sun | 'More Money, Less Health'

Communications — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:04:00 -0500

New America in the News:

More Money, Less Health (The Baltimore Sun)

A few years ago, health journalist Shannon Brownlee was going through some global health statistics. She noticed that even as U.S. health care costs were rising steadily, Americans were not getting healthier. How to explain this apparent paradox?

Brownlee became fascinated and began to collect data in search of answers. The result is Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, her analysis of how American health care has failed.

The book has received good reviews and was praised by one prominent economics columnist as the best business book of 2007. ... Last week, Brownlee, who lives in Annapolis with her husband and 12-year-old son, talked to The Sun about the perils of doing too much, and what might cure this ailment.

What's the key problem with our health care system?

Most physicians think of themselves as businessmen and -women. It's all based on the way we reimburse doctors and hospitals. Most payments to doctors and hospitals are called fee-for-service. In other words, they get paid for doing something, either having an office visit, giving you a test, putting you in the hospital, a consult in the hospital. This fee-for-service system basically rewards doctors and hospitals to do more rather than to do better. That's the central problem, I think, is the payment system. It's providing all these perverse incentives to do more. ...

NY Times: Shannon Brownlee's 'Overtreated' Is Economics Book of 2007

Communications — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:01:00 -0500

New America in the News:

On the front of the New York Times business section today, economics columnist David Leonhardt names Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow Shannon Brownlee’s book “Overtreated” as the best economics book of the year. Below is an excerpt from the article:

"...I’m going with Ms. Brownlee’s book [economics book of the year] because it’s the best description I have yet read of a huge economic problem that we know how to solve -- but is so often misunderstood.

As you’ve doubtless heard, this country spends far more money per person on medical care than other countries and still seems to get worse results. We devote 16 percent of our gross domestic product to health care, while Canada and France, where people live longer, spend about 10 percent.

Some of this difference is unavoidable. The United States does more than its share of medical research and bears much of those costs. It also has a diverse, economically unequal population, which, in turn, leads to a diverse and complicated set of health problems.

But health care spending simply can’t continue to rise at its current pace. If it did, it would “eventually overwhelm both the federal budget and workers’ paychecks,” as Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told me. “Slowing such growth is the single most important step we can take to assure our fiscal future and lift a growing burden on workers.”

Fortunately -- if that’s the right word -- there is an obvious candidate for cost-cutting: all that care that brings no health benefit. It’s not hard to find examples. Scientific studies have shown that many treatments, including spinal fusion, routine episiotomies and neonatal intensive care, are overdone. These procedures often help specific subsets of patients. But for a lot of people, and “Overtreated” is full of stories, the treatments are a modern-day version of bloodletting." ...

For the complete article, please follow this link.

CA Event: Overtreated

Communications — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/17/2007 - 12:00pm

In most markets, paying more buys better quality. When you pay $400 for a night in the Four Seasons, you expect to get a better room and better service than you would at Motel 6. But in health care, the normal rules of economics don't apply. The American health care system ranks in the bottom third of developed nations. American medicine kills 100,000 patients a year through medical error and our health statistics are on a par with the Czech Republic and Chile -- yet we spend twice as much per capita on average as any other developed country.

Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, argues that as much as a third of every health care dollar, about $700 billion a year, is wasted on care that patients don't need -- and would probably avoid if they knew how useless and dangerous it is. California spends more per capita on unnecessary care than any other state except New Jersey. If we want to control costs and improve the quality of care, the ongoing efforts to cover the uninsured in the state should include payment reforms aimed at reducing over treatment.

Shannon Brownlee is a writer whose stories, essays, and opinion pieces about medicine and health care have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Discover, BusinessWeek, Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly. As a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Brownlee’s work focuses on the U.S. health care system, and the cultural, economic, and political forces that result in poor quality and high cost. She has written extensively about the lack of scientific evidence for many medical practices, and the problem of unnecessary care, which accounts for as much as a third of the nation’s health care bill. Her new book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Americans Sicker and Poorer, is published by Bloomsbury Press.

If you have questions, call or email Claudie Bustamante at (916) 448-5189 or bustamante@newamerica.net.

CA Event: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer

Communications — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/14/2007 - 3:00pm

Shannon Brownlee, award-winning journalist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, has written and spoken widely about health care, genetic testing and the insurance industry, problems in the assisted reproductive industry, and the need for national policies to regulate new human genetic technologies.

In Overtreated, Shannon argues that the U.S. health care system delivers huge amounts of unnecessary care that is not only expensive and wasteful but can actually imperil our health. She shows how the interests of politicians and the medical-industrial complex continually trump those of patients, seducing the wealthy with unnecessary procedures and leaving the poor with haphazard access to treatment. In her talk, Shannon will also address the coming era of personalized genomic medicine. She’ll ask whether it is more likely to remedy the lack of evidence in current medical practice, or to exacerbate the problems of cost and unnecessary care.

Join the Center for Genetics and Society and the New America Foundation for a comprehensive look at how the American health care system fails to deliver value for its high spending. Egg Nog and holiday refreshments will be served.

To RSVP for this event, please click this link and sign up: Registration Page with name, affiliation, and contact information.

The Atlantic Highlights Shannon Brownlee's Ideas on Health Reform

Communications — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:15:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In the next eight years, medical schools intend to increase enrollment in order to accommodate the medical needs of aging baby boomers and replace retiring doctors from that generation. But Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that adding more doctors does not necessarily mean better care.

The Association of American Medical Colleges, which advises the federal government on how many medical residents to support, says that the country will be 100,000 doctors short by 2025 unless the average number of medical-school graduates rises. Ms. Brownlee says more than 12 new medical schools are now being constructed or considered, and many existing schools are expanding, with a goal of increasing the number of graduates from 16,000 a year to 21,000 a year.

Some experts are saying, however, that many doctors are choosing their location based on patients' wealth and quality of life. Ms. Brownlee says that doctors are in control of how much care their patients receive and that when there is an influx of doctors in one area, they can still keep their schedules busy, creating unnecessary expenses for the patients and sometimes putting them at risk. This attraction to heavily insured areas makes for shortages in parts of the country where more people lack insurance, such as rural areas.

Ms. Brownlee points to other ways in which too many doctors can have an adverse effect on the quality of care and drive up costs. In hospitals that have a high ratio of specialists to primary-care physicians, for example, having different doctors for the same patient can lead to mishaps such as duplicate tests, unwise prescriptions, and mistaken assumptions about care, she writes. Medical schools are graduating more specialists and fewer primary-care doctors, a trend that she believes could make such problems worse. ...

For the complete article, visit The Chronicle of Higher Education Online, which previewed The Atlantic Monthly article.