Prescription Drugs

Some reader questions on the national healthcare debate: How can we be sure that there will be no rationing of healthcare or pharmaceuticals under the bills being considered in Congress? Democrats argue that there is rationing in the current healthcare system, in part because insurance companies can rate consumers on the basis of preexisting medical conditions or drop them if they get sick. Those practices would be outlawed as part of the current legislation. As for pharmaceutical coverage, it's possible that some consumers could end up with more coverage for prescription drugs than they have now. -- Why is that?

Anna Nicole Smith's internist prescribed dangerous amounts of addictive opiates and sedatives even after she refused his recommendation of substance abuse counseling and stopped going to his office for appointments, an expert told a judge Tuesday. The expert, a physician specializing in the treatment of chronic pain patients, testified that Dr. Sandeep Kapoor provided excessive amounts of the medications without obtaining a complete medical history, sending out for lab tests or even trying to determine whether anything was actually wrong with Smith.

In a move that uses a key beer and bread ingredient to potentially revolutionize drug production, U.S. scientists said they had figured out how to use yeast to make vital human proteins. The scientists hope the technology can be put to work mass-producing human proteins like insulin. Writing in this week's Science, researchers from Dartmouth College and GlycoFi, a private firm in Lebanon, N.H., said they added five human genes to the yeast Pichia pastoris, making it into a human protein machine.

Amgen reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings, citing eased restrictions on Medicare payments for its drug Epogen. Medicare said last year it would not pay for Epogen to treat anemic kidney-dialysis patients whose red-blood-cell count exceeded a certain level. That hurt sales of Epogen, which is paid for almost entirely by Medicare and made up half of Amgen's $2.4 billion in revenue for 1997. A U.S.

A consumer advocacy organization has mounted a legal challenge to the managed-care industry's practice of monitoring doctors' prescription patterns, charging that the practice pressures physicians to hold down costs. Consumers for Quality Care has joined a lawsuit in Orange County in which a physician says he was illegally ousted from a large Newport Beach medical network after prescribing more expensive medications for his elderly patients.

A consumer advocacy organization has mounted a legal challenge to the managed-care industry's practice of monitoring doctors' prescription patterns, claiming that the practice pressures physicians to hold down costs. Consumers for Quality Care has joined a lawsuit in Orange County in which a physician claims he was illegally ousted from a large Newport Beach medical network in March after prescribing expensive medications for his elderly patients.

A consumer advocacy organization has mounted a legal challenge to the managed-care industry's practice of monitoring doctors' prescription patterns, claiming that the practice pressures physicians to hold down costs. Consumers for Quality Care has joined a lawsuit in Orange County in which a physician claims he was illegally ousted from a large Newport Beach medical network in March after prescribing expensive medications for his elderly patients.

Drug makers Hoechst AG and Andrx Corp. have been accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to block sales of generic drugs that would have competed with Hoechst's popular blood-pressure medication Cardizem CD.

Outdated labeling hides a popular diet drug's dangerous side effects when combined with antidepressants such as Prozac or cold remedies like Sudafed, researchers said. The diet drug phentermine--the "phen" in the now banned combination fen-phen--has been used in the United States since 1961 and remains on the market. It is widely prescribed to treat obesity. But the U.S.

Alza Corp. more than doubled the sales force it will use to promote a new incontinence drug it hopes will win U.S. approval by year-end, as it challenges its bigger rival, Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc. Palo Alto-based Alza, the largest U.S. maker of controlled-release drugs, hired a unit of UCB, the Belgian drug and chemicals group, to deploy 335 sales representatives to market the drug to primary-care physicians.