US News and Pharmaceutical Industry Report

Over the holiday I picked up a copy of the December issue of US News and World Report – the cover story promised a comprehensive review of the “best health plans” and more, more, more on health care. The reporting was pretty good and included one story with a decent overview of what health reform would mean for people in general. Of course, Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Zuckerman had a blistering multipage editorial at the end denouncing health reform bills now in Congress entitled the “Reform that Ate America.” Zuckerman’s problem with the bills now in Congress seemed to be that there wasn’t enough cost control. He didn’t even bother to address the Congressional Budget Office estimates that both House and Senate bills are fully paid for and will actually reduce the deficit by billions.

Zuckerman’s solutions? Try paying doctors and hospitals differently. Pay for outcomes and overall care for a patient instead of for each procedure and test individually. Good idea, and that’s why pilot programs to do this very thing are in the legislation. His other two suggestions were for more preventive care (which is also in the bills although no one thinks it will save much money but will improve health) and tort reform (again, CBO estimates are that tort reform would only save a vanishingly small percentage of our total health costs.

While I wish Zuckerman would be a little more honest with his claims, I couldn’t help also noticing that his magazine is a huge part of the problem of excessive costs in health care. Of the 98 pages in the magazine (including the back cover), nearly 25% were drug company ads. I’m including all the fine print pages too, so there were 11 full page ads for various drugs overall. A color full-page ad in USN costs $93,512; black and white costs $59,868. By my reckoning, the magazine pulled in between $1.5 and $2 million just from the drug companies for this issue alone.

I know the print world is in a tough spot right now, but having one-quarter of your ad revenue coming from the drug industry has to be some sort of record. You couldn’t read a story in the thing without looking at an ad for Flomax or Crestor or whatever. And many of the drugs advertised have either much cheaper generic equivanlents or really aren’t that effective anyway.

Does anyone see the delicious irony here? While the editor is railing against excessive health costs to argue we should defeat reform, his magazine is playing a big part in driving up those very same health costs by encouraging treatments that are expensive, ineffective, or worse.

The US News December issue is emblematic of our effort to reform health care. We have a lot of people working very, very hard to do the right thing, whether it is to write good stories about health topics and the health debate or pass decent legislation to cover everyone and bring down costs. At the same time we’ve got organizations with almost unlimited amounts of money trying to influence the health care debate and their markets in any way they possibly can, even if it means doing things like buying one-quarter of the pages in a national newsmagazine.