Aggregator

An executive with St. Louis-based Ascension has been hired to take over next month as CEO of the Philadelphia region's largest health system.

WHEATON — Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity (DCEO) today announced $15 million in funding to support tourism sector across Illinois, through the second round of the Tourism Attraction and Festivals Grant program offered by the State. Through the $15 million investment, which is open for applicants beginning today, $5 million will be reserved for festivals, which serve as economic drivers while bringing communities together, and $10 million will support a broad range of other tourism-related project such as attractions, museums, live performance venues and more. This grant is funded using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars. “When the pandemic struck, the tourism industry across the globe lurched to a standstill,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “That’s why, last August, I launched the Tourism Attraction and Festivals Grant program—delivering the support our communities needed to bring back

Continue Reading

Join leading figures behind the surge in union organizing as we discuss how best to increase worker power.

ST LOUIS, Mo. — The American Red Cross of Greater St. Louis has two shelters open: St. Vincent Community Center, 7335 St. Charles Rock Rd., St. Louis, MO 63133. Mason Clark Middle School, 5510 State St., East St. Louis , IL 62203 . CLOSED shelter: James Eagan Center, 1 James J Eagan Drive, Florissant, MO The James Eagan Center closed Sunday at 1 p.m. and individuals were taken by bus to the new location at St. Vincent Community Center (address above). The Red Cross provided shelter for 17 people last night impacted by recent flooding in the St. Louis area, all of them at the St. Vincent Community Center. No one stayed at the Mason Clark Middle School last night. Since opening the first shelter in the metro Tuesday night, the Red Cross has provided for a total of 127 overnight stays . Anyone needing a place during the day or overnight may stop in for water, snacks, food and to get information. Items to bring to a shelter include clothing for a few days,

Continue Reading

CHICAGO – Attorney General Kwame Raoul co-led a coalition of 20 states in urging the Biden administration to extend and expand temporary changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program to provide borrowers with more opportunities to get closer to loan forgiveness faster. Under the PSLF Program, remaining balances on federal Direct Loans are forgiven after borrowers – dedicated public servants such as teachers, firefighters, nurses and police officers – make 120 qualifying payments while working full time for a qualifying employer. However, due to the PSLF Program’s complexity and poor management, millions of public service workers have been unable to access forgiveness, and the program’s denial rates have been as high as 99%. To restore the promise of PSLF, in October 2021, the U.S. Department of Education announced a temporary “ Limited PSLF Waiver , ” which offers millions of qualifying public service workers the chance

Continue Reading

EUREKA, Mo. - A Eureka, Missouri home built on a bluff overlooking the Meramec River is coming to market on Saturday at $1.89 million. The four-level home, located on a 3-acre lot, is in the Rockwood School District. It has three bedrooms and six bathrooms. The 5,115-square-foot home is complete with unique features like the [...]

by Charles Ornstein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A dozen years ago, a Santa Monica, California, pain doctor named Gerald M. Sacks emerged as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s top paid speakers — anointed to extol the virtues of a variety of drugs, even though several experts in pain medicine said they’d never heard of him.

His drug company haul had occurred largely under the radar until 2010, when ProPublica started digging into what the firms were paying physicians to deliver talks and consult on their pills. That’s when we consolidated the payments from seven companies, most of which had been forced by government settlements to make them public, in a database we called Dollars for Docs.

Sacks turned out to be a big winner, and we wrote about how little in his resume explained why. He was even a focus of an op-ed we wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how patients are often unaware of the relationships their doctors have with drug companies.

Nevertheless, companies continued to pay Sacks large sums. From 2015 to 2021, he received more than $2 million from companies to speak and consult on their behalf, including spending on travel and meals, federal data shows.

But last month — 12 years since we first wrote about him — Sacks’ puzzling role as one of the drugmakers’ chosen pain doctors took a different turn: Federal prosecutors allege he’d been paid to prescribe.

Sacks agreed to pay more than $270,000 to resolve allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that he’d accepted kickbacks from drug companies Purdue Pharma and Depomed to prescribe their products. Purdue is the maker of OxyContin and pleaded guilty in 2020 to, among other things, conspiring to provide kickbacks to doctors. The Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits doctors from prescribing drugs in exchange for speaking or consulting payments from drug manufacturers.

From 2015 to 2018, Purdue paid Sacks more than $70,000 for speaking and consulting. Depomed, which changed its name to Assertio Therapeutics in 2018, paid him more than $285,000 for speaking and consulting from 2015 to 2018, according to the federal government’s Open Payments database. Neither Assertio nor its predecessor, Depomed, has been accused by the government of wrongdoing.

Sacks writes a few thousand prescriptions a year, including refills, to patients in the federal Medicare program. Among the tally in years past were hundreds of prescriptions for the drugs for which the government accused him of taking kickbacks.

Sacks denied wrongdoing in the settlement and did not return phone calls seeking comment. Neither Purdue Pharma nor Assertio returned emails seeking comment.

“Physicians are prohibited from accepting kickbacks designed to influence their decision making,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael D. Granston said in a news release. “Adherence to this prohibition is especially crucial with regard to dangerous drugs like opioids.”

The allegations against Sacks relate to his prescribing of the drugs Butrans, Hysingla and OxyContin, made by Purdue, to patients on Medicare between December 2010 and October 2021. They also cite his prescribing of the drugs Gralise, Lazanda and Nucynta, made by Depomed, to Medicare beneficiaries in 2016.

Experts say the evidence is now overwhelming that there is a strong association between drug company payments and doctor prescribing. This link is worrisome, they say, because doctors should prescribe medications solely based on what’s best for the patient, not because they receive money from the company that makes a drug. Some prescription drugs may be more expensive or have greater side effects than cheaper or generic alternatives.

Today, the federal government collects information on payments from all drug and device makers in its Open Payments database. Researchers say such payments show that patients and regulators need to be on guard.

In a research article last month in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the authors note it’s not just one study that found a troubling link between drug company cash and what doctors prescribe. “Every published, peer-reviewed study that has evaluated the association between payments and prescribing using a causal inference framework has found evidence that receipt of industry payments increases physicians’ prescribing,” they wrote. They call on a variety of parties, including doctors, the drug industry and regulators, to take action to reduce these conflicts.

Dr. Aaron Mitchell, one of the authors and an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said the ever-growing list of research findings upends the presumption that payments to physicians, particularly small ones like meals, don’t influence doctors’ prescribing.

“The legal interpretation of a kickback has long been that industry payments and other transfers of value to physicians are OK as long as they don’t influence prescribing,” he said. “We now have overwhelming data that such payments do influence prescribing. In light of that we need to seriously reexamine the status quo.”

Mitchell suggested that regulators, like the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, review their guidance related to industry payments and “be clear to everyone that these are going to be under increased scrutiny and increased risk of prosecution than they have in the past.”

The OIG’s Office of Counsel said in a statement that it “has long expressed concerns over the practice of pharmaceutical manufacturers providing anything of value to physicians in a position to make or influence referrals to manufacturers’ products.” The office issued a special fraud alert in 2020 that discussed the risks of speaker program payments to physicians and other practitioners by drug and medical device companies.

“OIG has pursued, and will continue to pursue, abusive financial relationships between pharmaceutical manufacturers and physicians,” the statement said.

In 2021, the most recent year for which there is publicly available data on payments to doctors, drug companies paid Sacks more than $84,000.

PONTOON BEACH - In an effort to enhance bus service for passengers and to improve efficiencies throughout the system, Madison County Transit (MCT) will be implementing minor adjustments at the regularly scheduled August service change, which takes effect on August 14, 2022. The August service change includes time and routing adjustments to the #1 Riverbend and #15 East Collinsville Shuttle, shifting the routes of the #2 Granite City Shuttle and #4 Madison-Edwardsville, and adjusting evening times on the #5 Tri-City Regional. “MCT is always looking for ways to meet the transportation needs of our residents and do so in an efficient manner,” said MCT Managing Director SJ Morrison. “These are minor adjustments to the service, but they make a difference to the passengers. MCT ridership has steadily increased across all bus routes in the last year, and we continue to seek feedback from the passengers and from the public on how to make the service as user friendly as possible.”

Continue Reading

SEE VIDEO: ALTON - Alton Athletic Association coordinated an event to remember Saturday with the first annual Redbird Amazing Race. The event began and ended at Piasa Motor Fuels Field. Madeline Eades, president of the Alton Athletic Association, said the event was great fun for the youth. “We thought it would be good for some of our businesses to meet our athletes and students and we wanted to create a fun event for the kids,” Eades said. “We wanted to engage the athletes and students in a fun activity. I think they had a great time and we appreciate the businesses stepping up. We plan to expand the event next year and make it even better.” Teams of Alton athletes visited 10 locations around town and completed a task at each one. Everything started and ended at Piasa Motor Fuels Field, the soccer/baseball complex behind Alton High School. Amy Lombardi, of the Alton Athletic Association, described the event as less of a race ad more of a scavenger hunt.

Continue Reading

Former President Donald Trump endorsed three incumbents in Missouri Congressional races ahead of Tuesday’s primary election.

A woman was shot in the chest outside of a Walgreens in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood Monday.

The St. Louis community is filled with passionate people and organizations that continually step up to fill gaps, and we want to help.

The executive will oversee the global real estate firm's asset services, valuation and advisory and project and development services in North and South America.

Among the leadership discussions in the various civic and business organizations in which I am involved, I have noticed a steady increase of discourse around one topic in particular: health equity. I am encouraged by these discussions because health inequities in our community impact all of us. It is crucial that we collaborate across industries, organizations and communities to eliminate health disparities and improve health outcomes for all. Health equity defined If asked, most of us would agree…

This is a young man reading a book at the very tip of the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine that was the original site of Paris. I had never walked out to the very end, so I decided to do it this time. Maybe next time I'll see ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

We looked at several sample ballots in the St. Louis region to give you an idea of what people will decide on Tuesday.