The New Health Dialogue

Here's our wrap-up of last week's articles by our own Shannnon Brownlee and Joe Colucci:

Letting Big Pharma Review Its Own Drugs — What Could Go Wrong? (The Atlantic Health Channel):

Earlier this month GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay a record breaking $3 billion fine for a slew of criminal and civil violations. But is a fine really enough? In a piece in The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee and Joe Colucci argue that we need to stop letting drug companies track the post-market safety of their drugs and establish an external automatic review system. 

12 Ways Health Care Could Be Improved If the House Wanted to Hold More Than Symbolic Votes (The Atlantic Politics Channel):

In the wake of the House's 33rd vote to repeal/defund Obamacare, Joe and Shannon propose a list of 12 things the House could have done to make a better use of tax payers' dollars and actually improve health care. In the article in The Atlantic the proposals range from enacting a less intrusive mandate to funding after school programs to teach kids how to cook. Any of them would have worked better than another "symbolic vote."

Why The ‘Best’ Hospitals Might Also Be The Most Dangerous (TIME Ideas):

We've all seen them—the U.S. News Rankings of everything from colleges to cars. How do their hospital rankings look? In her latest article for TIME, Shannon argues that, based on new rankings by Consumer Reports, many top-name hospitals fail to measure up in terms of safety. Hospital rankings would be a lot more useful if they considered how medical care affects most patients, not whether a hospital performs some cutting-edge procedure on three patients per year.