The company says the disclosure, which is posted at www.pfizer.com/WorkingWithHCP, is the first in the industry to report payments made for conducting Phase I-IV clinical trials in addition to disclosing payments for speaking and consulting. It reflects payments made between July and December.

Almost 44 percent of the disclosed payments are associated with Pfizer’s collaborations with approximately 250 research organizations to study how medicines work and to discover new medicines, the company says in a statement. In total, Pfizer reported payments of approximately $15.3 million to these institutions for all new clinical trials started after July 1, 2009, as well as clinical trial payments made between July 1 and December 31, 2009 to academic medical centers for ongoing or new research.

“Our work with clinicians makes possible both product development and the steady improvement of medical standards and patient care,” says Freda Lewis-Hall, Pfizer’s CMO in a statement. “Pfizer is committed to ensuring these relationships are transparent to the public and are carefully managed, so that we foster trust and sustain our ability to deliver the breakthroughs patients have come to expect from us.”

Pfizer spokeswoman Kristen Neese tells the New York Times that most of the disclosures were required by an integrity agreement that the company signed in August to settle a federal investigation into the illegal promotion of drugs for off-label uses. Pfizer paid a $2.3 billion fine in that case, the largest criminal fine of any type in the nation’s history.

Pfizer is the fourth major drug company to make such disclosures, following Eli Lilly, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. But it’s difficult to search the sites. Pfizer’s, for example, is 486 pages long and contains 4,856 names.  But it’s not as much as some other drugmakers’ totals; Eli Lilly, for instance, detailed $22 million in payments in its first quarterly disclosure last year. GlaxoSmithKline and Merck have also released information on their payments to doctors: Glaxo’s $14.5 million over the second quarter of 2009 and Merck’s $3.7 million for the third quarter.

Beginning in 2012, the NYT notes, drug and medical device companies will be required to disclose payments of more than $10 to physicians, with the first report available in 2013. The federal Physician Payment Sunshine Act was passed as part of healthcare reform and signed by President Obama last week. Some states also have disclosure laws.

This report doesn’t include Wyeth payments. Wyeth data will be included in reports once systems have been integrated. The next report will be posted on March 31, 2011 and will include data from January 1 through December 31, 2010.

Source: FiercePharma

If the House passes the Senate health bill on Sunday, as Democrats hope, and President Obama signs it into law, the overhaul will be official -– signed, sealed and delivered. But the president is reluctant to celebrate, officials said, because the House Democrats will have also passed a companion measure fixing things they don’t like about the Senate bill, and that companion measure will still need to go through the Senate.

Discussions are still ongoing, but press secretary Robert Gibbs said in an interview Thursday that the White House is not likely to stage a celebratory event after the House acts on Sunday, preferring to wait for the Senate to pass the companion bill first. That could easily take days. To celebrate the earlier step would likely annoy House Democrats, who are only voting for the Senate bill with the promise that the fixes will be approved as well, Gibbs said.

Still, the president will probably have to sign the Senate bill into law so that the Senate can get to work, according to a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian. At that point, the overhaul will be law, and Obama will no doubt mark the moment. But in a weird twist, the White House doesn’t plan much pomp or celebration.

“This is a very much a two-step process,” Gibbs said.

White House officials say they’re not taking passage for granted, while Republicans say they can still defeat the bill.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The leadup to the meeting has been disorganized and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on or who is really going to take the CEOs to task. HHS pushed out a press release on Feb. 24 saying the meeting would be yesterday at the department’s HQ.

Then the meeting got moved up to today and relocated to the White House. Rumors are swirling that President Obama himself might sit down with the CEOs for a friendly chat.

The insurance honchos, including WellPoint’s Angela Braly, UnitedHealth’s Stephen Hemsley, Cigna’s David Cordani, Health Care Service Corp.’s Patricia Hemingway Hall and Aetna’s Ron Williams, are expected to keep pressing the point that rising premiums are due to underlying medical costs that are rising at an alarming clip. Execs and their trade group have said hospitals are asking them for 40% reimbursement increases and to pay for high-end biotech drugs that are running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What’s likely to come out of the confab? It’s an opportunity for the White House to push the health overhaul by continuing to stoke what it has seized on as a signature issue –- the 39% rate increase that WellPoint asked for in California’s individual market. But like last week’s bipartisan health summit, it’s likely to end up being little more than an exchange of talking points.

Update: Maybe this wasn’t a routine exchange of talking points, after all. The Health Blog talked to four of the five big dogs in attendance in the Roosevelt Room this morning and they all reported that the tone shifted from the politically charged rhetoric of recent weeks to something more constructive. Obama did make a cameo, to read a letter from a health-plan member in Ohio with a 40% premium increase, which sparked some constructive discussion. Wonders never cease.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

• What happens if Washington does nothing on healthcare, the New York Times asks? Health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree that the unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly.

• Democrats said their seven-hour meeting with the president and Republicans confirmed their belief that it was futile to try to work with the other party on a major healthcare bill because the philosophical differences were too profound, the Times also reports.

• Speaking of philosophical differences, the Wall Street Journal Health Blog breaks those down for us: Should the change be comprehensive or incremental? Should we count on access to help control costs, or cost-control to help improve access? And should government set the standard for insurance coverage, or should markets be allowed to juggle that out for themselves?

• Now, among Democrats, the push for votes: Obama plans to announce a way forward this week in a bid to break the impasse on his proposals. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on members of her party to think of the American people first, rather than themselves, and vote for reform.

• Meanwhile, President Obama also is leaving the door open to bispartisan negotiation, saying he’s serious about working with the Republicans on changing healthcare proposals–provided they’re serious about working with him.

Source: FiercePharma

“We have allowed the arm of regulatory science to become weak and underdeveloped,” FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told reporters. If not fixed, “instead of pulling us into an exalted future, we will row in circles.”

To get the partnership up and running, the agencies agreed to form a committee of six top scientists drawn from both organizations. They will provide $6.75 million over three years to fund regulatory science research. President Obama’s proposed budget also includes $25 million to improve the science in use at government agencies. The regulators even announced a few priorities, like shortening the time it takes to test the potency of flu vaccines. Instead of three or four months, the agencies believe that wait can be halved.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius promised that “this is going to mean that new treatments are safer and available sooner.”

Anyone outside the vaccine field, though, isn’t likely to shorten their timelines on regulatory reviews anytime soon. If scientific committees and small budgets were all it took to transform the FDA’s review record, the average cost of development would be much smaller than it is today.

Source: FierceBiotech

But the aim of the summit was to find shared ground, so here are some small patches of agreement during the session:

Medicare malpractice: Republicans have push hard for curbs on malpractice suits to cut costs, something the Democrats have been slow to endorse. President Obama said today he wanted to work with the GOP on changes, although he disputed the size of the prospective cost benefits. Possible limits on malpractice damages remain a major sore point.

Purchasing pools: Democrats back purchasing exchanges for individuals and small businesses to pool their purchasing power and get better coverage for the buck from plans meeting federal standards. Republican Sen. Mike Enzi told the summit that he goes along with purchasing exchanges, but they should include all the plans insurers want to offer.

Pre-existing coverage denials: There’s general agreement that insurers shouldn’t be allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing health conditions. But Republicans favor setting up pools for high-risk coverage while Democrats want to mandate that most people buy insurance, which would spread the risk.

Dems and Republicans all pledged to try to build on the areas of agreement, such as they are. But it wasn’t clear if the efforts would get any further than the bipartisan bickering before the summit.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The Obama plan is crafted mainly from the Senate-passed bill, but not entirely.
Here are some of the big points in the proposal, as posted on the White House Web site:

• The plan’s cost is pegged at $950 billion over a decade — more than the Senate bill but less than the House measure — and is supposed to reduce the deficit by $100 billion over 10 years.

• A proposed tax on high-end, or “Cadillac,” health plans would be delayed until 2018 for all workers, and the value of such plans triggering the proposed tax would be raised to $27,500.

• The so-called doughnut hole in Medicare drug coverage would be closed entirely, with fees on brand-name drug companies being increased by about $10 billion above the fees on the drug industry already provided in the Senate bill.

• A new Health Insurance Rate Authority would determine what it considers reasonable rate increases for health coverage, and those hikes considered unjustified could be blocked.

• Medicare taxes would apply to unearned income for upper-income households and more cuts would be made to the Medicare Advantage program, private plans that serve some seniors.

• More money would be raised through penalties on businesses that don’t offer coverage and individuals who don’t carry it. Companies with more than 50 employees that don’t offer coverage would pay $2,000 per person.

In line with the earlier bills, the new plan would cover some 31 million people and bar insurers from dropping coverage for preexisting conditions. It also increase subsidies to make coverage more affordable.

Source: The Wall Street Journal



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• The president and top Democrats promised they’d push ahead on healthcare reform. At a town hall meeting in Ohio, the president said, “We can’t keep on putting this off.” And he warned that a failure to act now could end up bankrupting individuals and the country as a whole as healthcare costs continue to rise.

• The White House zeroed in on several elements it hoped would survive the healthcare battle, including measures to extend the life of Medicare, lower prescription drug costs for seniors–a key provision of the storied $80 billion deal with pharma–and cap consumers’ out-of-pocket medical expenses.

• Former presidential candidate John McCain advised President Obama to “start from the beginning” on healthcare by meeting with Republicans. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” McCain said Obama could win political capital by adopting a Republican idea or two.

• Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” White House adviser David Axelrod promised that President Obama isn’t giving up on a healthcare overhaul, adding that it would be politically foolish for lawmakers who supported it so far to walk away now. He painted Republicans as obstructionists, saying that voters want them to work together with Democrats to fix healthcare, not simply say no to every potential change.

• To help push the healthcare reform agenda, President Obama has brought in his 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, to run his political operations and help get reform back on track.

Will the Dems’ efforts work? Or is reform bleeding too heavily to salvage?

Source: FiercePharma

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Here’s a passage from the interview that gets lots of play in the morning news:

I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are … some of the core elements of … this bill.

As the papers note, this list notably excludes a mandate that everyone buy health insurance — a contentious provision that was included in the health bills passed by both the House and the Senate.

Insurers have argued that the only way they can sell insurance to all-comers — including those with pre-existing medical conditions — is to have a mandate requiring everyone to buy insurance. Otherwise, there’s an economic incentive for people to wait until they get sick to buy insurance.

Obama raised this issue later in the interview:

If you ask the American people about health care, one of the things that drives them crazy is insurance companies denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. Well, it turns out that if you don’t … make sure that everybody has health insurance, … you can’t stop insurance companies from discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions. Well, if you’re going to give everybody health insurance, you’ve got to make sure it’s affordable. So it turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected.

And he talked about the long slog of trying to get a health-care bill through Congress, and how it’s drawn attention away from other issues:

I wish we had gotten it done faster … I think that what’s happened is, is over the course of this year, there’s been a fixation, an obsession in terms of the focus on the health care process in Congress that distracted from all the other things that we’re trying to do to make sure that this economy is working for ordinary people.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

President Obama said the ban was not compatible with US plans to be a leader in the fight against the disease.

The new rules come into force on Monday and the US plans to host a global HIV/Aids summit for the first time in 2012.

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The ban was imposed at the height of a global panic about the disease at the end of the 1980s.

It put the US in a group of just 12 countries, also including Libya and Saudi Arabia, that excluded anyone suffering from HIV/Aids.

The BBC’s Charles Scanlon, in Miami, says that improving treatments and evolving public perceptions have helped to bring about the change.

Rachel Tiven, head of the campaign group Immigration Equality, told the BBC that the step was long overdue.

“The 2012 World Aids Conference, due to be held in the United States, was in jeopardy as a result of the restrictions. It’s now likely to go ahead as planned,” she said.

In October, President Obama said the entry ban had been “rooted in fear rather than fact”.

He said: “We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the Aids pandemic – yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people with HIV from entering our own country.”

Source: BBC NEWS