Bill Richardson would get rid of health-savings accounts, the tax-advantaged savings plans that go with high-deductible health insurance. “These are a step backward,” he said at a health-care forum today. “They put working families at risk. Most families cannot afford to pay the Â… out of pocket costs.”The accounts are popular with some health wonks, [...]

  If you get sick in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, there’s a good chance you’ll meet Hiram Ward, age 81. He’s been practicing medicine in Murfreesboro (pop: 1,678) since 1953, and lately he’s been spending his nights and weekends taking calls at the emergency room there.Ward went back to work in the ER at the start of this [...]

  Bill Richardson would require all Americans to buy health insurance and let the feds negotiate for lower prices on drugs for seniors covered by Medicare. Those are a couple of the points he’s likely to raise today when he talks with a bunch of journalists, including the WSJ’s Laurie McGinley. The talk is at 1:30 [...]

  Olympus — yes, the same Olympus that sells cameras — announced today that it’s offering $1.9 billion to buy Gyrus, a U.K. company that designs equipment for minimally invasive surgery, the WSJ reports.Minimally invasive surgeries have grown a lot in recent years and demand is likely to increase as the world population ages and technologies [...]

  In another century, Botox was a drug to treat eyelid spasms and other neuromuscular problems. Then Allergan, the company that sells the drug, seized on a side effect — the way it makes some wrinkles vanish temporarily — and turned the drug into a cosmetic superstar. The same thing could happen with Allergan’s Lumigan, a [...]

  Last month’s raid on WellCare turned up what an agent described as a “letter to get around Medicaid requirements,” the Tampa Tribune reports. The raid also found a document the CFO named the “2007 Stairway to Heaven Plan,” and a $20,000 check to “Puerto Rico patron saint festival,” among other things. Those were among the [...]

  Celgene, the company that priced its cancer drug Revlimid at more than $6,000 a month, said it will buy Pharmion in a cash-and-stock deal worth $2.9 billion.Therapeutically, the deal makes sense. Pharmion has the European rights to Thalomid, Celgene’s thalidomide-based cancer drug. And both Revlimid and Pharmion’s own drug Vidaza are approved for a group [...]

  The Health Blog looked for stories you might have missed this weekend. Here’s our short list.Parents faced jail time if their children didn’t receive mandatory vaccinations or get an exemption, a Maryland judge said. So more than 100 kids and parents lined up outside a Maryland courthouse Saturday morning to work things out. More than [...]

  With pipelines sputtering, the drug industry is rife with companies trying to teach old medicines new tricks. Just yesterday we wrote about Cogentus Pharmaceuticals’ concept to combine the ingredients in blood-thinner Plavix and heartburn-stopper Prilosec in a single pill to reduce gastrointestinal bleeding risks. (A few of our commenters seemed less than enthralled by the [...]

  Who knew just how important chickens are to the U.S. economy? We sure didn’t. But the Health Blog got a sense of it today, when the feds green-lighted Schering-Plough’s $14 billion deal to buy Dutch drug maker Organon — on the condition that the companies sell three bird vaccines to Wyeth’s animal health unit.“The U.S. [...]