Corporations celebrating GOP win

Corporate American must be celebrating the GOP victories, because the Healthcare reform push initiated by Hillary Clinton a long time ago and pushed by Obama might be pushed back or buried. Further, deregulation and no-regulation will be the order of the day- sweet music to Corporate America. Genentech will be celebrating, so will be Pfizer and others.

Genentech Offers Secret Rebates to Promote Lucentis - NYTimes.com: "Genentech has begun offering secret rebates to eye doctors as an apparent inducement to get them to use more of the company’s expensive drug Lucentis rather than a less costly alternative.

Under the program, which started on Oct. 1, medical practices can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars in rebates each quarter if they use a lot of Lucentis and if their usage increases from the previous quarter, according to a confidential document outlining the program that was obtained by The New York Times.

Lucentis, approved in 2006, is mainly used to treat age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. It costs about $2,000 for each injection, with an injection into the eye needed as often as once a month.

The competition comes from Avastin, another Genentech drug that has the same mode of action. While Avastin is approved only to treat cancer, many retina specialists say it works just as well in the eye as Lucentis. So they are using it off-label because each injection costs only $20 to $50.

Using Avastin instead of Lucentis saves Medicare — and costs Genentech — hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The rebates are considered a form of volume discount, and have been offered for some other drugs. They are legal if they adhere to certain guidelines.

Still, some doctors said they had ethical concerns about the arrangement.

“There’s no way to look at that without calling it bribery,” said Dr. Greg Rosenthal, a retina specialist in Toledo, Ohio, who has been critical of attempts by Genentech to get doctors to use Lucentis. He is not a participant in the rebate program.

Genentech, which is owned by the Swiss company Roche, said in a statement, “Rebate and discount programs are a common business practice across the industry, including in the field of ophthalmology.” The company said it had such programs for other drugs and that they “help reduce the cost of our medicines for hospitals, pharmacies and doctors.”

Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Special Committee on Aging, who has investigated efforts to curtail the use of Avastin in the past, criticized the Lucentis incentives.

“This rebate program appears to be an attempt to reverse the trend of significantly reduced reimbursements that Genentech has been receiving from Medicare for Lucentis,” Mr. Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement. “I am highly doubtful that Medicare will benefit in any way from the rebates being offered to doctors.”"

Confusing efficiency with smallness

The Republican Party has won the mid-term elections, despite the fact that eight years of Republican rule resulted in the worst financial disaster in modern history and in two wars which consumed scarce resources.

The GOP, bowing to the Tea Party agenda, wants small government and less taxes. The major engineering and scientific organizations all point to the deteriorating infrastructure in the country, including crumbling roads, pipelines, airports, and other facilities. These won't improve by themselves, unless the government invests in them or they are sold off to private entities. Perhaps this is the next leg of privatization- selling off the infrastructure of the nation.

Efficiencies and productivity improvements are desirable, and so is unambiguous declaration of one's intentions.

Want redundancy, want to eliminate redundancy

Having spent years in the telecommunications industry, designing systems that are up more than 99.999% of the time meant complex architectural decisions and incorporating redundancy in many aspects of the system. Customers demanded that level of performance, and were willing to pay for it. However, firms like Cisco proved that dP/dQ, the first derivative of Price w.r.t. reliability Q was high and d/dQ (dP/dQ), the second derivative, was positive, and that customers could get a slightly lower reliability level at a much lower price point. Customers bought into that argument.

During the past decade, firms have eliminated redundancy, especially in operations involving humans. They have extracted significant financial gains, sometimes at the cost of a lower level of reliability and customer satisfaction. The following article reveals that firms want geographical redundancy to eliminate geo-political risks, but do want their outsourcing partners like Infosys to help eliminate redundancy in the outsourcer's operations.

Big IT moves more work, jobs to China - The Economic Times: "As the Chinese pitter-patter into IT services turns into a loud clatter, Indian majors are pushing hard to grab a bigger slice of that market. TCS, Infosys and Wipro plan to shift at least 10% of their new outsourcing projects to Chinese cities of Dalian and Chengdu, for the first time since India’s software exports industry took note of the Chinese threat a decade ago.

Top customers like GE and General Motors are demanding that Indian vendors deliver some services from locations outside India because of geo-political risks and location redundancy. India’s tech behemoths are also realising that by creating local jobs in China, they can gain a bigger share of the Dragonland’s $10-billion-plus outsourcing market.

While TCS plans to increase its existing 1,200-employee base by over five times in the next few years, Infosys will invest $100 million to build a 4,000-professional-strong team. Wipro, the third-biggest software exporter, will have around 1,000 professionals in a year’s time."

InSane numbers

Stewart/Colbert rally broadcast draws 2 million to Comedy Central - USATODAY.com: "The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew tens of thousands to the National Mall in DC — and 2 million viewers to Comedy Central from noon to 3 p.m. ET, according to Nielsen figures.

There were 570,000 live video streams of the event served up on the web and mobile devices, the network says, as well as 120,000 Tweets, 50,000 Foursquare check-ins and 35,000 rally photos posted via Flickr. Oh, and the network says there was an audience of 250,000 at the event itself, although the National Park Service no longer offers official crowd counts. Washington Transit officials said Metro ridership broke a 19-year-old Saturday record."