Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...measures are likely to be built around a bipartisan Senate bill, sponsored by Democrat John Breaux and Republican Bill Frist. Just last week the pharmaceuticals lobby in Washington announced its tentative support for the Breaux-Frist approach, which would compel insurance companies to provide a "high-option" plan with drug benefits and then help cover the cost of that insurance for the poor and near poor. With its bipartisan cachet, the Breaux-Frist bill is likely to become the big starting point for a fiery debate, particularly since next year the Senate Finance Committee plans to take up comprehensive Medicare...
...problem with all the proposed solutions is that no one can be sure about their unintended consequences. A new Medicare entitlement on the order of the Clinton-Gore-Bradley model could become a cost nightmare as boomers age and drug companies continue to crank out much coveted new drugs. But there's no guarantee that the alternatives would have enough money behind them to really cover the millions of Americans who are hurting from high drug costs. Meanwhile no one wants to see the pharmaceuticals industry, which has been full of inventions during the past decades, be stifled by government...
...heart. Yet all other signs indicate that something good is happening. Patients experience much less chest pain, or angina, and can run much longer on a treadmill. Although encouraging, such quality-of-life reports are not enough to convince other doctors, not to mention the Food and Drug Administration, that the treatment is effective. Researchers are confident, however, that improvements in imaging technology will soon allow them to detect the presence of the new blood vessels that they believe are there...
There are still hurdles. Traditional mental-health professionals are more focused today on drug therapies than on social rehabilitation. Ruth Hughes argues that the profession's "belief system" still contains "the idea that people with schizophrenia never get better." Insurance companies have been slow to be convinced that these programs work and will ultimately save money. And many employers still resist hiring the mentally ill. American Postcard's Castaldo recalls telling a fellow businessman "how well I'm doing with handicapped people." The man was interested, Castaldo relates, "but when I mentioned mental health, a wall came down...
...course, Schering-Plough would pay almost any amount of money to protect its exclusive right to sell Claritin, a drug that brings it more than $5 million in revenue a day. Claritin sales totaled $1.9 billion last year, and will balloon to $4 billion by 2002, according to a market analyst. To keep the money coming in, the company doubled its lobbying outlay starting in 1996 to more than $4 million in 1998. Among its other paid advocates: former Senator Dennis DeConcini; former Watergate assistant special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste; and Thomas Parry, former chief of staff for Senator Orrin...