Colorado Is Testing Potential New Model for Revamping Health Care

Kate Harveston

Kate Harveston is originally from Williamsport, PA and holds a bachelor's degree in English. She enjoys writing about health and social justice issues. When she isn't writing, she can usually be found curled up reading dystopian fiction or hiking and searching for inspiration. If you like her writing, follow her blog, So Well, So Woman.

Related Post Roulette

9 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    The Health Care Crisis is a Price problem and we have a Price problem because we have a supply problem.

    Even if health care was free* for the next year, the problems we’d see addressed are the problems created by red tape and an inability to manage risk after a huge number of people explain that they have reevaluated the amount of risk they’re willing to accept.Report

  2. greginak says:

    No post for this but i’m seeing research on the twitters that docs are finding some anti malarial drugs are proving useful in treating COVID. Speeding up recovery and lessening symptoms. These are old drugs that are widely available.

    Hopefully this pans out but until then up with science. Good news and hope is, you know, good.

    Noah Smith @Noahpinion has more details.Report

    • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

      Last night I was pointing to this article.

      ScienceDirect paper

      Here, we demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 uses the SARS-CoV receptor ACE2 for entry and the serine protease TMPRSS2 for S protein priming. A TMPRSS2 inhibitor approved for clinical use blocked entry and might constitute a treatment option. Finally, we show that the sera from convalescent SARS patients cross-neutralized SARS-2-S-driven entry. Our results reveal important commonalities between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV infection and identify a potential target for antiviral intervention.

      A few initial experiments indicates that it works in a dish, so it should block entry of the virus into lung cells. The drug, Camostat Mesilate, is already used in Japan to treat pancreatitis, and it’s also used for cancer and liver disease. About two-dozen companies there make it under a dozen different brand names, and a bottle of 100 pills (100 mg each) sells for $35. (But the one Japanese source I checked was sold out last night, so I couldn’t put any in my shopping cart.)

      But it’s not FDA approved, so over here some bureaucrat will probably say it won’t be available here until long after the last Covid-19 victim is lowered into the ground. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they quickly try it overseas and find out if its really a magic bullet against the virus. If so, I’m sure Trump will make the FDA wave some procedures so we can start using it immediately.Report

      • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

        I’m sure if it works it will be fast tracked. There are already compassionate use programs. In this case if they work we’ll see them given away almost as freely as Halloween candy.Report

  3. DensityDuck says:

    One is left wondering why we don’t just adopt Canadian manufacturing practices, seeing as how their drugs are so much cheaper but still acceptable.

    Or is there some magic in the land of the red maple that makes them able to produce drugs at lower cost?Report

    • George Turner in reply to DensityDuck says:

      We can’t, because we have rules to make sure our drugs are safe and effective. Canada has rules too, but their rules probably make sense.

      Many years ago I was programming an automated transfer car for Torpharm (Toronto Pharmaceuticals).
      The car is like a robot trolley that runs up and down a set of railroad tracks, stopping at various pallet lanes to pick up or drop off pallets of raw materials. I had it all debugged and working fine, so they signed off on it and said their next step was to delete all my code.

      Me: “Uh, delete my code? Why? The code works fine.”

      “Because some of the drugs we’ll make could be shipped to the US, and under FDA rules we’re not allowed to have even one line of code written until we spend six months describing what the code will do, once we start writing it.”

      Me: “That’s insanely stupid.”

      “Yes it is.”

      Me: “But it’s just a transfer car. It doesn’t make anything. It doesn’t touch any chemicals.”

      “But it’s a machine used in the production of drugs, so it has to conform to FDA guidelines.”

      Me: “So the factory is ready now, but you can’t use it for six months?”

      “No. We can’t start writing the code to make the factory work for six more months. The factory is probably years away from actually being up and running.”

      It’s an example of bureaucracy run amok. One of the millwrights on the job said he’d worked constructing an FDA approved distribution center in the Carolinas. He spent a couple years there, assembling the conveyor system and then tearing it back out because the FDA had mandated some minor change. Under the rules, if there’s any change in requirements they had to start the construction all over again, from scratch. He said he took that conveyor apart and put it back together three times, and loved doing it because he was getting paid a whole lot of money.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to George Turner says:

        gotta be honest with you, I am okay with government inspections being psychopathically anal when it comes to quality manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. If there’s one thing that I want to be five-nines sure that it’s clean and will work, it’s drugs.

        We could go round-and-round on the degree of effort spent on “telling people not to do anything until the FDA says it’s okay” versus that spent on “making sure it’s okay”, but I’m not gonna say these guys shouldn’t have that attitude. I mean, in this circumstance I’d expect you to say “no production until we’ve done our review” and then you work twenty-five hours a day reviewing, but I don’t want there to not be a review.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to DensityDuck says:

      Canadian drugs aren’t cheaper because they have better manufacturing practices; they’re cheaper because of price controls on patented drugs. Generic drugs are actually substantially cheaper in the US than in Canada.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        Suggesting that we could do the same thing as reimportation for less money by instituting price controls.

        Of course, this begs the question of why we just don’t have price controls already, and why we’ll be allowed to reimport drugs but not institute price controls.Report