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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Lowering Drug Prices Would Counter Medicare Flaw: Study

America's seniors would have better access to medicines if U.S. drug prices were slashed to the level paid in other industrialized nations, according to a new analysis cited by HealthDay.

A 45 percent price cut would let Congress eliminate a gap in coverage that will occur when Medicare's outpatient prescription drug benefit takes effect in 2006, the authors conclude. Lower prices, they add, would make it possible to enhance drug coverage for seniors at no additional cost to the federal government.

But there's a tradeoff. Price cuts could stifle the pipeline of pharmaceutical innovation, leading to fewer new drugs coming to market, according to the research, which appears in the July 21 online issue of Health Affairs.

Study author Gerald Anderson, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said Congress faces a clear-cut decision.

"The clear choice," he said, "is better access to drugs for Medicare beneficiaries or higher prices for drugs that may lead to more research and development."

Anderson's study was funded by the Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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Florida Investigating Alleged Drugmaker Overcharges

Florida authorities are investigating allegations that six manufacturers of generic drugs overcharged the state Medicaid program by an average of $10 million for each of the past 10 years, the Sun-Sentinel of South Florida reported Wednesday.

The purported overcharge of a combined $100 million occurred when the six manufacturers allegedly sold drugs to retail pharmacies at lower prices than to the Medicaid program, the newspaper reported. According to state Attorney General Charlie Crist, if the allegations are true, they would violate state law, which mandates that Medicaid pay the lowest prices available.

Crist's office told the newspaper it has evidence the manufacturers charged pharmacies below-wholesale prices to make their drugs more competitive. The pharmacies would reap the benefit since Medicaid would reimburse them the full wholesale price of each drug, which would have been more than the price initially paid to the manufacturer.

The attorneys general of other states have filed similar lawsuits, first led by Massachusetts last September. Except for a suit settled in May by the state of Texas, the other cases are still pending, the Sun-Sentinel reported.

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U.S. Wants to Digitize Medical Records

The U.S. government wants to transform the ink-and-paper medical records of today into electronic forms worthy of the modern computer age.

Citing "a previous lack of cohesive federal policies" for the digitalization of patient records, the Bush administration wants to hasten the transformation by setting standards and goals for the private sector players who will undertake the massive project, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

In a report titled "The Decade of Health Information Technology," the government says if most patient records were in electronic form, the savings in paper-handling costs and related charges would amount to $140 billion a year, or nearly 10 percent of the country's annual health-care bill, the newspaper said.

Computerized records would also cut down on medical errors, which account for an estimated 45,000 to 98,000 deaths a year, according to the government report. Many of these mistakes stem from illegibly written instructions and delays in sharing hand-written information, the Times said.

Only 13 percent of the nation's more than 6,000 hospitals have any kind of electronic patient record system, the newspaper said.

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Hospital Monitoring Group Missed Serious Problems: Report

The private agency that reviews hospitals to receive Medicare payments missed many problems later identified by state inspectors. And those problems potentially compromised patient safety, according to a Congressional report released Tuesday.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations missed 167 of 241 "serious deficiencies" in a survey of 500 hospitals that were reviewed between 2000 and 2002, the Government Accountability Office said. The agency, Congress' investigative arm, used to be known as the General Accounting Office, the Associated Press reported.

Many of the missed problems were related to fire safety. Some, however, involved poor patient care. In a Texas hospital, a patient died after receiving a double dose of narcotics in the emergency room and "medications were administered without physician orders," the report said.

And a California hospital lacked "a sanitary environment to avoid sources and transmission of infections and communicable diseases and failed to develop a system for ensuring the sterilization of medical instruments," the GAO said, according to the news service.

The commission accredited 82 percent of U.S. hospitals in 2002, the report said. Those hospitals received $98 billion for Medicare-covered services that year, the AP said.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), who jointly requested the report, are introducing legislation to increase Medicare's authority over the commission.

Commission President Dennis O'Leary said the agency made significant changes to the Medicare accreditation process earlier this year. "In our view, it is irresponsible to alarm the public using statistics that have little meaning," O'Leary said in response to the GAO report, the AP said.

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Melanoma Vaccine Shows Promise

Researchers are reporting promising results with a vaccine that may prevent the recurrence of melanoma in people who have already had the potentially fatal skin cancer.

The study included 46 Australians who were given varying doses of the vaccine or a placebo after they had had a cancerous tumor removed. Two years later, the cancer had reappeared in five of the seven patients who had been given the placebo. Among the 19 patients given the full dose of the vaccine, however, only five showed any signs of a recurrence of melanoma.

The vaccine combines a cancer antigen, called NY-ESO-1, with a drug designed to stimulate the immune system, called ISCOMATRIXTM, BBC News Online reported.

The researchers plan a large-scale trial to further test the vaccine. Results of the study appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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