Category: Uncategorized
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This Was Not the Plan
I really don’t want to be writing this. I want to be reading obscure things about drug regulation and thinking about how our ideas about governing business evolved and toying around with next projects. But instead I am tethered to a body that won’t go along with my wishes. I could catalog symptoms, but long…
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Dealing with Brain Fog
It appears that the two modes of this blog are “boring stuff about drug pricing” and “symptoms.” I guess we all process in different ways. I’ve mentioned before that brain fog has been something I’ve struggled with over the last few months. There are times—whole weeks, even—when I feel cognitively fine, and can’t really tell…
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Pills, Power, Policy, Part 2
I’m still reading and thinking about Tobbell’s Pills, Power, and Policy, and Chapter 4 really sucked me in. It covers Estes Kefauver’s bid to reform the pharmaceutical industry from 1959 to 1962, culminating in the Kefauver-Harris Act. Kefauver, a Democratic from Tennessee and recent presidential candidate, was also chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust…
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Pills, Power, and Policy, Part 1
This week I’m reading about the history of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry: Pills, Power and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and Its Consequences, by Dominique Tobbell. It’s really fascinating, and I can’t believe I haven’t run into the book before given how closely it overlaps with various topics I’ve worked…
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Drug Pricing circa 1990: Mapping the Literature
This blog is an early-morning project for me—a time to think and learn about whatever I want, purely for the pleasure of doing so. That means reading as well as writing. But I also know that it’s easy for reading to overtake writing, so I’m trying to spend as much time on the latter as…
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Two Models of Pricing Drugs
For those of you keeping track, I’m feeling mostly back to normal after losing several days to drug side effects. I only took one day of the new medication, which means I’ll have to revisit the dilemma of whether/how to continue some form of risk-reducing endocrine therapy. But for now I’m relieved to be back…
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Back to the Body
I was having a good stretch there for a while. Reengaged with work, writing on here about the political economy of drugs rather than the experience of cancer and its treatment. It was all good. But the “all good” was missing a critical piece. At the end of October, when my body was really falling…
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Of Models and Morals: Value-Based Pricing as a Case
I have always been interested in our broad frameworks for thinking about social/economic problems, how those frameworks shape the choices we see as reasonable, and how they remain stable or, eventually, change. As a graduate student, I found the history of the corporation compelling in this regard. This was the kind of story told by…
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The Personal and the Academic
There’s a lot that I could write about my personal experience with cancer. And it’s likely that I will return to that at some point, especially if I feel physically worse. But one big reason for starting to write publicly was to try to find my way back to my research. During treatment, I finished…
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Maybe We’re Investing Too Much in Cancer
As a cancer patient, I am really glad there are drugs out there to treat it. That includes chemotherapy drugs like Taxotere and Cytoxan, immunity-increasing drugs like Neulasta, anti-nausea drugs like Zofran, and endocrine therapies like Zoladex and Arimidex. As shitty as some of them are, these drugs have substantially upped my odds of long-term…
One Year Later 