'Most favored nation' pricing could help solve high drug costs, and other letters

Regarding Modern Healthcare's Year in Review coverage “High drug prices emerge as 2015's top issue,” rapidly rising drug prices is one of the most pressing issues facing consumers, physicians and hospitals. Many are calling on government to negotiate pricing for drugs. Drug companies argue that they need to recover the cost of research, etc., which is reasonable. What is not reasonable is for that burden to fall only on consumers in the U.S.

I suggest that the government mandate that prices in the U.S. be given “most favored nation” status when compared with West Europe, Canada and Japan. In other words, we would pay no more than the lowest price among those countries. The developed countries should share in R&D. It would be far less complex than negotiating prices for individual drugs. The drug companies should have to verify this under penalty of law.

Charles O'Brien

CEOWeirton (W.Va.) Medical Center

Regarding the guest commentary “Hospital (un)productivity,” electronic health records have been responsible for a substantial portion of the inefficiency we are experiencing. Hopefully, that will turn around in the future, but that will not happen until the systems become far easier to use and interoperability between systems exist.

One only needs to walk around a hospital to see the army of nurses and doctors sitting for hours behind computer screens entering and searching for relevant data about their patients. So we have $75/hour and $200/hour professionals typing and clicking. The environment is not McDonald's or a Ford assembly plant.

Only when highly paid professionals are able to interact with computers using natural speech to store information and then search for concepts and reports will EHRs increase productivity.

Dr. Thomas Reminga

Milwaukee

Regarding “Healthcare industry gets cybersecurity support in omnibus bill,” if you want people to responsibly handle a 2-ton automobile on the road, you give them driver's ed before you issue a license. You don't just rely on rule-making rules and issuing tickets. But if you want to avoid accidents, you need to address the drivers' training.

If you want providers to handle sensitive electronic health records while actively exchanging them on the “information superhighway,” then you have to train them in cybersecurity. You can't just rely on more rules and stricter enforcement.

All I hear from the government is more rules, better technology and higher penalties. But without technical support at the provider level, we will see 100 million-plus records breached again. And because of the nature of the data, we will suffer the consequences for decades to come.

Patrick Casey

Meaningful use and QA specialistNorth Texas RegionalExtension CenterIrving