Here’s a winter storm warning: show up for work during a blizzard or lose your job. Washington Hospital Center has fired eight more employees who didn’t show up for work during last month’s snowstorms that blanketed DC, the Washington Post reports today. That’s on top of 16 workers who had been previously fired.

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Storm Brews Over Snow-Related Firings at DC Hospital

Five CEOs from the health-insurance big dogs (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, etc.) are at the White House this morning to discuss — or more accurately, take flack — over the health overhaul’s issue de jour: rising insurance premiums. The leadup to the meeting has been disorganized and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on or who is really going to take the CEOs to task. HHS pushed out a press release on Feb.

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Health-Insurance Top Hats Take Heat at White House

Five CEOs from the health-insurance big dogs (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, etc.) are at the White House this morning to discuss — or more accurately, take flack — over the health overhaul’s issue de jour: rising insurance premiums. The leadup to the meeting has been disorganized and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on or who is really going to take the CEOs to task. HHS pushed out a press release on Feb

View original post here:
Health-Insurance Top Hats Take Heat at White House

The FDA plans to increase prosecutions of pharmaceutical and food industry executives as part of an effort to refocus its criminal division, which has been under attack in Congress and is criticized in a new government report, the WSJ said this morning.

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FDA Set to Ramp Up Criminal Prosecutions of Executives

All is not well in the land of insulin pumps — the devices that deliver insulin to mostly Type 1 diabetics — and the FDA wants to put a spotlight on the problem. Noting that there had been 18 recalls of pumps over five years because of hardware and software problems, the FDA said that “device problems critical to insulin pumps exist across manufacturers.” The agency has called a meeting of outside experts for Friday to see what can be done about the risks

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FDA Finds Problems With Insulin Pumps ‘Across Manufacturers’

Bad news on the Alzheimer’s drug development front: Pfizer and Medivation announced negative results from a large late-stage trial of Dimebon, thought to be a promising treatment more potent than those currently on the market. Dimebon, you may remember, got its start a quarter-century ago as a Russian cold medicine that Pfizer plunked down $225 million for licensing rights in 2008

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Pfizer-Backed Experimental Drug for Alzheimer’s Fails in Trial

A version of this post by WSJ’s Jean Spencer also appears on the Washington Wire blog. A coalition of consumer, public-health and food-safety advocates is trying to jumpstart the food-safety legislation that is stalled in the Senate

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A Jumpstart for Food-Safety Bill?

Lots of health headlines this morning, most surrounding the Democratic overhaul efforts. Meanwhile, the Senate figured out a way to avoid crimping Medicare payments to doctors

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Health Roundup: Obama to Add GOP Ideas, Medicare Cuts Avoided

The American Cancer Society put out updated guidelines for prostate cancer screening today and they look, well, a lot like the current ones. After reviewing the recent scientific literature, there’s still no evidence that routine screening for men of any age makes sense, according to the committee that issued the guidelines. They continue to recommend that men of average risk receive information and weigh the “uncertainties, risks, and potential benefits” of screening starting at age 50

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New Prostate Cancer Guidelines: Routine Screening Still Unneeded

It seemed like only a question of time, but Bristol-Myers Squibb said this afternoon that Lamberto Andreotti, its president and chief operating officer since last March , would succeed James M. Cornelius as CEO. Andreotti, a 12-year veteran of the company, is 59 years old and Cornelius is 66

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Bristol-Myers Puts Andreotti in Driver’s Seat