Many journalists are aware of the drug industry’s attempts to gain positive attention by buying placement within the nation’s health care news. A few occasionally write or talk about it, as Harder and Rosenthal did publicly. But, writes Gary Schwitzer in Health News Review, we don’t talk often enough about why it matters if health care industry entities are allowed to advertise within, or sponsor, health care journalism content. Americans spend more than $3 trillion on health care. Conflicts of interest in health care and research are rampant. But who talks about conflicts of interest in health care journalism? There is a great potential harm in journalists – and the audience they serve – becoming numb to the presence of and influence of drug companies and other industry entities in the news and information disseminated to the public. In a three part series, Health News Review examines this problem. Read Part 1. Read Part 2.
Beyond Obamacare: Stopping Corporations from Making People Sick
Cross-posted from the American Prospect
by Nicholas Freudenberg
The next generation of health reforms should loosen the grip of corporations on the health of Americans, an issue that will resonate with voters angry about special interests in 2016.
Since the sweeping health-care law best known as Obamacare took effect in 2010, Republicans have voted 63 times to repeal or gut it, and Democrats have argued over whether to expand it or scrap it in favor of a public single-payer plan. But not much attention has been given to going beyond the Affordable Care Act to take on the root cause of our nation’s most serious health problems: a corporate system that profits by sickening people.
Continue reading Beyond Obamacare: Stopping Corporations from Making People Sick
Corporations and Health Watch 