Hmm, Well I Thought This Was a Free Country, and Other Links
Can you be trusted to do your own genetics test? FDA will decide. (And you thought this was a free country?)
Substandard and counterfeit drugs cost 13 percent to 18 percent less in the global marketplace. However, the market is far from perfect.
Another blow to ObamaCare: Pay-for-performance not working in Massachusetts.
On the fake drugs, “60 Minutes” did a segment on this last night.
Pay for performance not working? what a surprise.
Doctors policing doctors doesn’t work.
Only a fifth of doctors have experienced an incompetent colleague in the past three years? That sounds rather low. I would expect nearly every doctor would have experienced a substabdard colleague (the possible exception would be the incompetent colleagues themselves).
Ditto Neil.
FDA will decide if I can conduct my own gene test? Whose life is it anyway?
Actually, the BMJ study suggests that physicians do a pretty good job of policing themselves.
In the US sample there were 1,289 respondents. 16.5 percent reported direct experience with incompetent of impaired colleague. The sample itself was heavily weighted towards family physicians. They made up 68 percent of the sample. Psychiatrists made up 13.6 percent of the sample. This is probably not a sample that is representitive of the US physician population.
A follow-up question asks whether the individual filling out the survey reported the impaired of incompetent physician to authorities. Roughly 3/4 of physicians said that they had reported the physician.
In the US, 3/4 of the respondents protected their patients by saying that they stopped referring patients to that person. )In the UK only 17 percent stopped referring the patients.) A lower but not statistically significant percentage said they did not report the offender due to fear of retribution.
Of those who did not report, a quarter said that this was due to the fact that the problem was being taken care of by someone else. In short, a very small fraction of the cases of bad behavior were allowed to slide even assuming that the claims of incompetence were correct in all cases.