WaPo | Months before Gilead Sciences’ breakthrough hepatitis C treatment hit
the market, Oregon Medicaid official Tom Burns started worrying about
how the state could afford to cover every enrollee infected with the
disease. He figured the cost might even reach $36,000 per patient.
Then the price for the drug was released last December: $84,000 for a 12-week treatment course.
At
that price, the state would have to spend $360 million to provide its
Medicaid beneficiaries with the drug called Sovaldi, just slightly less
than the $377 million the Oregon Medicaid program spent on all
prescription drugs for about 600,000 members in 2013. It potentially
would be a backbreaker.
Faced with those steep costs, Oregon and
several other states are looking to limit who has access to the drug
that nearly everyone acknowledges is a revolutionary treatment for the
disease affecting more than 3 million Americans.
Expensive
specialty drugs aren’t new to health care. But Sovaldi stands out
because it is aimed at helping millions of Americans who carry hepatitis
C, and a large share of those infected are low-income and qualify for
government coverage. Its arrival also coincides with the aggressive
expansion of Medicaid and private coverage under the Affordable Care
Act, whose purpose was to extend health care to tens of millions
Americans who previously couldn’t afford it.
Sovaldi has prompted
fears among insurers and state officials that the breakthrough drug,
despite its benefits, could explode their budgets. And that has sparked
an urgent and highly sensitive debate in Medicaid offices across the
country: How far should society go to make sure the poor get the best
available treatments?
60 comments:
Sounds like an opportunity for rabble rousing. I know the patients aren't going to take that lying down.
The "least of these" gonna dehydrate in Detroit, and the "least of these" with sexually or IV drug transmitted hepatitis gonna die, period. Gilead is not the public water services in a major city. There aren't 8 wheat-bellied unionized busters standing around the manhole in reflective vests while one little cat is under ground doing all the work. There isn't a bloated parasitic bureacracy sitting atop the delivery of public services here.
No, this is pure intellectual property, privately owned, highly sophisticated synthesis and quality control. Let somebody flex on them one time and they can pick up all their toys and go home. As new treatments, interventions and enhancements come online in the dawning era of deeply sophisticated genomic pharma and medicine, intelligence boosting, life extension, cancer curing, etc..., these sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic capabilities are going to be rationed like the magical elixirs of legend. Watch....,
[quote] It might just bring attention to the mess the healthcare system is in.[/quote]
A HA!!!
AMERICA'S "health care system is not in a state of 'mess' "
* El Salvador
* Guatemala
* Central African Republic
* South Sudan
* Bangladesh
* Yemen
HAVE AN ABSENCE of a "Health Care System" and the PEOPLE OF AMERICA who are most inclined to claim a "Spiritual Link" to the people in the above nation - CAN'T SEE PAST their CONSUMER DEMANDS for a "Single Payer Social Justice System" in America to order themselves so that THEY ARE the SOLUTION PROVIDERS for the GLOBAL DIASPORATIC 'The Least Of These".
Thus your "MESS" is contextual in nature from the perspective of a "Global Black Republican"
Isn't that part of the plan?
You just like arguing. The problem is you only shoot one way. American healthcare is a mess right now. If I remember right people were going bankrupt because their insurance fucked them. Insurance companies found ways to pay as little as they could get away with. Now Medicaid has expanded and almost they can get is an aspirin. We have a lot of new Medicare enrollees in the future. And they bring their problems to the table. So yeah it's a mess.
High stakes game of chicken. We already know how that ends...,
I was always big on farming indoors.
...This is the price paid for "Call 1-800-LAW-SUIT if you had a bad outcome....."
lol, either that post WW-II propaganda REALLY did a job on you, or, somebody pays you to bend over and grab your ankles. Look BD, you've had a long-time struggle with the toxic effects of high-fructose corn syrup. Your personal suffering as a result of the wholesale industrial use of this food additive which is not exactly food (being that its more harmful to your liver than straight ethanol) really is not your fault.
If, on the other hand, you believe you're personally culpable for consuming mass quantities of USDA subsidized and FDA approved additives like high-fructose corn syrup, and the associated biophysical liabilities attendant thereto, then, by all means accept your peasant fate and disdain the efforts of others less inclined to grab their own ankles on demand, and forego any and all legal remedies these folks are able to obtain from profit-maximizing companies that devised and implemented large-scale experiments on an unsuspecting and trusting citizen populace.
Like the "least of these" muhhukkas in Detroit, marching and whining about the ongoing concerted efforts to privatize 20% of the planet's surface fresh water supply, you and your'n will get exactly what you fight for and by that measure, exactly what you deserve.
I'm glad you figured it out because I had no idea where that came from. Lol, so that's been the problem? It might be time for him to meet Mary Jane.
Science denial is the art of cherry -picking. If a scientific discovery works for their very narrow conception of religion, then science denialists still love it. One imagines, for example, that they get their flu vaccine every year. (A vaccine, funnily enough, made possible by our understanding of evolution.) They use the Internet, fly in planes and take advantage of the latest medical breakthroughs. These scientific advancements improve their lives, so they don’t question how it was discovered.
Pretty sure this article was one big cherry pick. But come now, vaccines were only possible when we understood the tenants of evolution? Or how is Ham's theology about aliens, or more accurately those ignorant of Christ have anything to do if there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, it's not unscientific to understand the odds of another planet having just the perfect position conditions to evolve life to intelligence. And because the author has a different opinion on when the fertilized egg is considered alive, i.e. "falling short of a medical definition of pregnancy", really should have no bearing on demeaning another group's understanding of the science.
And what fool ever says such and such causes cancer, do cigarettes automatically cause cancer? No, but it raises your odds of getting it. The author call the idea of abortion having an effect as bogus and "0" scientific data. Absolutely oblivious to many studies about this, maybe this would be the best summary:
http://www.bcpinstitute.org/epidemiology_studies_bcpi.htm
And finally we top it off with the powerful consensus of global warming, and the strong claims that if it wasn't for the knowledge of the tenants of of macro evolution we wouldn't know how to make a rocket engine, we got ourselves a pretty strong article here.
Thought you could find this ok...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30vyrdhiwwQ
In the USA, year-to-year life expectancy has been increasing. So if high-fructose corn syrup was that big of a problem LE would take a hit. You can see, below, liver failure is not a biggie.
Heart disease is **the** major killer, and if we were in your shoes, CNu, we would worry more about consumption of certain other products ---> http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/23/marijuana-use-linked-to-heart-problems/comment-page-8/
Urban gardens absolutely are sustainable. If people actually gardened.
Tenets, not tenants.
yep thanks.
"But come now, vaccines were only possible when we understood the tenants of evolution?"
C'mon, now. Viruses are pretty good at killing people. Viruses make people question the idea of intelligent design. Or maybe the creator's not the nice guy that supporters claim.
http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/viruses-and-evolution
lol, what is it with silly human expectations that something more intelligent, more conscious, and more capable than themselves MUST necessarily be kind, patient, and indulgent toward them? What if the "intelligent designer" created these "ensouled" humans as a food source? What if "go into the light" means something COMPLETELY different than these silly sheep have been taught to believe that it means?
Yeah the ants who used to live in the wall of my house might have viewed me as a sort of benign shelter and climate-control spirit. That view wasn't exactly 100% wrong, but it was far too narrow. At some point we got ants in our bedroom and eliminated the whole nest.
Like the Invaders in John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline.
lol@"White" Tom, why it gotta be like that?
I know my place man!
That is a nice idea for a story. Shades of NOI, shades of a lot of things.
Ken is stepping up his game with some lil debate-club booby traps!
my bad, did he say something?
p.s., lol, stop poking your lip out cause I said your meatspace blackfield is sparse. your status at the blackest barbershop on these Internets is not in question.
Looks like the William Lane Craig play book. As if we don't understand what Christian apologetics is about.
Ha! I gotta turn the other cheek to WinterSplinter, was your point.
Despite the claim of SCIENCE.......................THE BIG BANG THEORY - in which all matter in the universe fit into the space as small as the head of a pin and then EXPLODED is as much "JESUS MAGIC" as "The Lord Created Heaven And Earth In Seven Days".
EVOLUTION - as APPLIED TO-DAMNED-DAY by the SECULAR PROGRESSIVE IS INDEED a RELIGIOUS RITUAL used by them to counter their bete noir - the RIGHT-WING CHRISTIAN "Biblical Literalist"
What YOU and Neil De Grasse Tyson keep doing is to CONFLATE "Cosmology/ Physical Science" with THE ORIGINS OF LIFE ON EARTH. THIS IS WHERE your claims FRACTURE like "Physics" is related to "Quantum Physics", meaning the SAME RULES DO NOT APPLY.
In your theory the "JESUS MAGIC" of TIME does causes INERT MATTER to COME TO LIFE and ASSUME INTELLIGENCE, a MOLESTATION of the "Entropy" that is typically seen in physical science.
"The Creator Is Unfalsifiable" - IF ONLY you could believe the same thing about SOCIAL JUSTICE and began to take a MORE DEFENSIVE DISPOSITION - I would then allow all of the rest of or relatively minor disagreements to slide by as a matter of "that which is lost in the translation".
The problem isn't that the science is bad science. Evolution is great work. Look some time at how many transitional forms have been found since Darwin wrote about them. That's a prediction -- we'll tend to find fossils in between existing fossils. It turned out to be accurate.
Big Bang I don't understand clearly, but it's a theory that's consistent with certain data.
The problem isn't that the science is bad science. But there is a problem, and I believe it's somewhere near where you're poking.
Beam in your own eye, splinter in your brother's and all that. Against some things, there's just no winning. My point to you was that your intercession on behalf of one of your existential enemies is not a good look. Only the sparsest of blackfield resumes would have you believing and behaving as though any representative of the afrodemic or afro-trekkie ilk is anything other than an existential enemy.
Admittedly, they're a sufficiently limp-wristed, butt-hurt, and attenuated enemy that they'll never exhibit the decency to come right out and tell you they'd love nothing so much as to gut you like a fish. If you had a bit more depth and strength in your personal and professional blackfield, you'd know exactly whereof I speak. Take my word for it, or not, as you see fit.
Contrary to what the voices in your head are telling you, nobody here gives flying phuk about Neil De Grasse Tyson or your endlessly repeated talking points preoccupation with him. Anybody who has been paying attention here, knows that the tired little tropes you love to go flailing and flapping about are irrelevant.
Life and complexity don't occur and proceed contrary to entropy or because of geologic expanses of time. Rather, they happen because of the existence of gradients http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2010/04/beyond-farthest-reach-of-suns-power.html and the fact of genetic hypertrophy or strong biology http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=symbiogenesis
CNu ... Well, I'm finally reading you at least. You think I'm not aware that Makheru is an "enemy" ... in the highly theoretical sense that if he had any power he'd be happy to use it against me & mine?
The contingency is so remote that it's silly to even think about. It's the stuff of BD's waking dreams. As a matter of fact a former acquaintance of mine here in town has begun wearing these fake African getups and so forth -- the local black community shy away from him; the rest of us don't even do that. We worry astronomically more about any individual homeless person, or about sunburn, or wildlife, than about the Radical Dude. I have woodchucks eating my wife's container plants. They come right up onto the porch! That's a real threat.
The childishly forceful two-by-four of Sage Advice from WoodenSplinter was that I refused to "stand up to" Makheru because I lack testicles. Now that (in contrast to Makheru's plan to rise up and destroy the white man) that foolishness actually rises to the level of mildly insulting. So I correctly directed my annoyance at WoodenSplinter, not at a harmless streetcorner crazy.
Fine, so now I took a poke at Makheru after all. Bravo.
rotflmbao...., karma given his obsession with having the last work with Ed. Me, I'm still waiting to be chastised by the big kahuna of kufidom - though I'm not holding my breath in anticipation.
If you say so, sir!!
OH LOOK.
The microprocessor in the computer that I am typing on is made of SILICON with circuits etched with acid - JUST LIKE the $29 toy robot that my son broke open the other day that had "Made In China" on it.
THUS the theory is proven!!
Not only did I discover different generations of evolution for "SILICON-based intelligent LIFE"..............I also uncovered their migration between land-masses around the world - via "Multi-Modal Shipping Containers".
CNu - how do I file a patent on my scientific/archaeological discoveries above before someone STEALS THEM and has their name recorded in history next to Darwin and Richard Dawkins?
"Makheru's plan to rise up and destroy the white man." Well jes dayum J. Edgar. Marilyn Buck must be turning over in her grave. I have a suggestion. Take your belief that everyone is the same to Stormfront. You will find who your enemy is.
Uh, the Big Bang and evolution are both falsifiable. Someone can come up with a better theory tomorrow. If that happens, scientists would move to the new theory.
Belief in evolution is pretty common. It's not SECULAR PROGRESSIVES fighting the RIGHT WING ENEMY. It's an accepted theory and the people that have problems with it are a little odd. Now there's "intelligent design." So you're telling us that someone took millions of years to give us shingles, HIV, houseflies, malaria, cockroaches, cataracts, rats, mambas, cobras, rattlesnakes, ring worms, tapeworms, flesh eating bacteria, prion disease, yeast infections, meteors, and made us vulnerable to everything I just named. Not believing in a designer is a reasonable position. The list makes evolution look suboptimal. Evolution looks pretty damn clumsy to me. You can have your creator if want to. I'm not going to deny that indulgence.
I'm assuming the Good Doctor decided it's not worth his time responding to a wimp who got punked by a group of impotent 2nd/3rd line civil rights inheritors.
Simple is as simple does..., everything else is conversation.
lol@lip.just.stay.poked.out.about.nonsense...., demonstrating precisely why the "movement" needs to get more fiber in its life.
Jesus Christ. The silly ole naive "belief that everyone is the same" is what keeps Stormfront marginalized and whining in the shadows.
What happened to the people around here who used to link their words to something in the real world?
So get involved in biology. Propose a theory and predict something. Otherwise, yeah, conversation.
Here's the real battle. And you're not fighting it, you're sulking in your tent.
Say you cook up an intelligent design theory that does make predictions. So unlike those I've seen, it's falsifiable. And say as new fossils turn up, your theory works even better than Natural Selection. In fact the Constructive Feedback Theory of intelligent design becomes the dominant paradigm for understanding the fossil record, and deservedly so.
Now what do you do? Do you feel any better about the new theory than you did about the old one? Why or why not?
We can make a theory of intelligent design that makes predictions distinct from those of natural selection.
Let's do it now. The Optimal Form Theory of Intelligent Design (OFT) (Naive Tom, 2014) states ...
(*) ... that an overwhelmingly intelligent designer creates forms that are all optimized for their environments. These creatures are not merely the best fit for their environment among those forms previously existing. They are the best possible fit to the environment within the constraints of living tissue.
Now I claim further that, as a prediction of the OFT: A new form, introduced from elsewhere on earth into a new environment, for which it is not optimized, will be unable to survive alongside existing forms that have been optimized by the designer for that environment. "Invasive species" will die out.
Now we look around and see. I don't know what the statistics on transplanted species are -- how many become runaway successes like the Japanese Beetle in the US in the 1970s, versus how many just die away, hopelessly incapable of competing outside their niches.
But having emitted this theory, I'm disappointed that rabbits were so successful in Australia. Even if I dig up statistics that show the fantastic success of the rabbit in Australia to be a very rare event, I still have to explain it somehow. Because, rabbits? Really? It looks to me as if the OFT needs to be modified or else weakened. OFT fails to explain the rabbit in Australia; Darwin's theory does offer an explanation.
But I'm encouraging skeptics of Darwin's theory to fix this shit. The theory isn't good enough? Correct! Welcome to science! Theories are disappointing! Help out!
Tom:
Can you show a SINGLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE on "Inter-species EVOLUTION"?
It is stunning that we live in a world of INCREMENTAL INTELLIGENT DESIGN via APPLIED SCIENCE and CONSUMER MARKET VIABILITY of certain products and medical treatments......many of which MODEL animal behavior OR apply human engineering to genetics or make use of animal-byproducts......
YET when it comes to the notion of INTELLIGENT DESIGN as the store of INTELLIGENT ANIMAL AND PLANT-LIFE on this Earth......................you demand that I "Take You To The Creator" before you believe that this and not RANDOM EVENTS is "Your God".
1. Can you show a SINGLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE on "Inter-species EVOLUTION"?
Yeah, I think so. How about this famous transitional form between birds and dinosaurs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx
Is that what you mean by inter-species evolution?
2. you demand that I "Take You To The Creator" before you believe that this and not RANDOM EVENTS is "Your God".
I don't think I made that demand.
"Random events," capitalized or not, is an extremely slippery concept and not to be trifled with. "Random" has no meaning beyond "cards in the deck that we haven't looked at yet."
"Random Events" is the modern God. It's not a very inspiring God, and we're feeling the pain.
The struggle...., better than that. I can show endosymbiosis and symbiogenesis for days. Start with "mitochondria", from there, veer over to the structure and function of your own appendix, finally, there's a nifty little bon mot that Dale sent me yesterday - with staggering evolutionary implications http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28440006
pause, process, consider, and enjoy....,
Yeah, I'm alert to problems that arise from our insane worship of anything that sounds vaguely sciencey. Which flaky worship seriously contaminates the (to me) more respectable side of the lay evolution debate.
But if these anti-evolution guys have nothing to offer but hot air, then they're even worse than their opponents.
I know, the minimal chemical reaction is current flow. It's kind of awesome.
Yes it's possible to get very tired, very quickly, of people who have only a popular-science-book concept of what entropy is, lecturing about it. Condensation is a process that -- if we carefully look at only part of a physical system -- appears to contradict the law that "entropy increases." Forget about intelligent design, let's start arguing for divine intervention in the process of crystalization.
So, but, somebody must have already written this paper:
The Fermi Paradox Resolved!
Evolution produces huge amounts of "waste energy" [1,2,3] and the life forms eventually choke on the like bacteria in a finite food supply.
[1] Analogous to the energy that flows from a kid's popsicles into the freezer, as they freeze (decrease their entropy). If the "scientific creationists" want to give us free publicity by launching into a vast public debate on whether popsicles can really freeze, that's great!
[2] I haven't actually estimated whether it's huge or miniscule.
[3] That's where so-called global warming comes from. It's actually the Energy of Evolution of the world's combined life forms, just as predicted in the Book of Genesis.
Mr. Feedback, your problem here is you arguing points that the modern evolution community has agreed to. 1. There is no fossil evidence that supports inter species gradual development. The new term is punctuated equilibrium. Also there has been no scientist who has been successful in creating a new species in a lab setting, so therefore the claim of species gaining complexity through mutation has been vacated.
In this setting, you have one person arguing points from the old theories of evolution that have been vacated without being corrected by his ally who is arguing evolution from newer theories. So it makes it kind of tough. Perhaps reading this little summary will help. In essence, Darwin theory of mutation and gradual development from species to species is dead. Although the text books have yet to reflect this.
http://www.scq.ubc.ca/evolution-may-proceed-largely-through-merger-and-acquisition/
Of course there's a massive amount of evidence of transitional forms, and new ideas don't in any way eliminate experimental evidence. But Ken's way of doing things is to just lie outright at every opportunity.
Ken, We've talked before about the recurring failures in your reasoning. Three in play here are (a) your inability to distinguish between the very different concepts "finite amount of data" and "no data" (which you claim are the same), (b) your belief that theoretical ideas can prove data is absent, and (c) your belief that every time two biologists propose different theories, evolution has been disproved. I won't waste both of our time trying to correct your reasoning, because of course you're lying intentionally.
When the article says the fossil record doesn't demonstrate continuous change, that is a truism that applies to any finite set of data. It simply means that the fossil record is discrete, not continuous. There is a massive record of transitional forms, with gaps in between that decrease in magnitude every time a new transitional fossil is discovered. But there are always gaps. That is in the nature of finite data. Only an infinitely large fossil record could completely eliminate gaps.
Obviously every time paleontologists discover another transitional form, the prediction by Darwin's theory ("continuous evolution via survival of the fittest") of transitional forms is strengthened. As CNu and Vic have explained to you at least a dozen times between them, Darwin's theory has been connected with the concept of genetic mutations (a post-Darwin idea) but is in no way dependent upon it.
On the other hand, look at the article you're citing. A scientist interested in working a theory into the gaps has to point at the gaps. Is there a theory that says "whoa, there are no continuous transitions", but that works? The authors are attempting to do that.
What the heck, Ken? This is an embarrassment. Go talk to people who don't know any science about these things. Why talk about them here?? If you didn't know the moves of chess, would you play over and over against people who've been playing for years and just keep claiming victory "because he said a pawn moves 1 square, and the other guy said a pawn moves two squares."
We don't have data to prove that the planets move continuously in their orbits. There might be little gaps.*
Newton's laws still make great predictions about the planets' orbits. Einstein and then DeBroglie did not erase the historical data that suggested planetary orbits might be well viewed as continuous curves with no gaps. They didn't erase the usefulness of theories based on that continuity ... in the range of conditions where those older theories were already making accurate predictions. Outside that range (for example electrons 'orbiting' atomic nuclei), Newton's theory led to nonsense and is wrong.
This is science. If you don't like it, there's a simple cure: stop getting it on you.
--------------
*In fact our best mechanical theory we have says there are only a finite number of positions that a planet can take in its orbit. They're too closely spaced to be observable, but that is the prediction, and in other circumstances it can be a very important prediction.
YET when it comes to the notion of INTELLIGENT DESIGN as the store of INTELLIGENT ANIMAL AND PLANT-LIFE on this Earth......................you demand that I "Take You To The Creator" before you believe that this and not RANDOM EVENTS is "Your God".
CF -- Ok, yes, this part of what you're saying is a completely different argument. It sounds correct: even the proven existence of gradual development of present forms over time doesn't disprove "incremental design."
If I understand you correctly, you could even suggest that what scientists call "random" is just another name for the "irreproducible effects of divine intervention." In science "random" simply means "we can't know its value until after we measure."
For example a perfectly-encrypted message that I can't decode is "random" to me.
Why is this an embarrassment? I have put forth articles from the theory that has grown out the lack of evidence of the old theories. And theory is held in high regard in these parts. It seems from my vantage point gradualism is pretty close to necessary to the concept of evolution work for a theory to get from less complex to more complex species.
I think your interpretation about gradualism i.e "simply means the fossil data is discrete" seems a little watered down compared to: "has not been demonstrated in the field, nor in the laboratory, nor in the fossil record". Obviously that's a little more of a problem. Darwin was concerned about that also, he wondered why he wouldn't see transitional species when he walked out his front door. I do too. But he said that the species probably don't live too long and only the bookends are alive. So he said his only real proof will be in the fossils. He expected many fossils, because of the gradual steps in between each species would be many times more than the bookend species themselves.
Of course that isn't how it has worked, we are a 150 years later, and we have nothing, no indisputable transitional fossil. We have some interpretations that some say are, but none without dispute. Today we have over 100 million identified fossils in the various museums around the world, and if Darwin was right about gradualism, it would be predictable that a high majority would be transitional species. That's more than just little gaps, or one step instead of two as you have claimed.
And thus with this lack of evidence, and also the inability of any scientist to create a new species through mutation, we see Darwinism fading away as a viable theory. Its false.
"They didn't erase the usefulness of theories based on that continuity ... in the range of conditions where those older theories were already making accurate predictions."
If mutation have never been observed in the lab or the field that has caused a new species, and if there is no undisputed transitional fossils and no observable transitional species, what are the accurate predictions?
"This is science. If you don't like it, there's a simple cure: stop getting it on you."
I believe I am asking the right scientific questions.
lol, this is embarrassing and repetitive. Transitional fossils between known forms have been found again and again and again. You know that, but you deny it. All right. What is there to talk about?
“What happened to the people around here who used to link their words to something in the real world?” Look in the mirror, since you’ve chosen to play white Sambo for Subrealism Simon Legree. You cannot produced a scintilla of evidence to link your accusation of “Makheru's plan to rise up and destroy the white man,” to something in the real world, thus you--Subrealism Sambo--are detached from reality.
Speaking of an existential threat, who went “Mein Kampf” on the elderly?
Post a Comment