The foundation, which focuses on raising money for breast cancer research and prevention, said it was pulling about $700,000 in breast cancer screening and service grants from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America under a new policy that forbid support for organizations under investigation.

Planned Parenthood is the under investigation that was launched last fall by House Energy and Commerce Investigative Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.

But Planned Parenthood’s supporters argued the investigation is politically motivated and based on allegations proved to be unsubstantiated.

Komen, they charged, was simply knuckling under to pressure from anti-abortion groups and using the new policy as cover.

Reaction was swift and fierce with abortion-rights supporters denouncing Komen from the floor of Congress to Facebook pages.

In a statement, released today the Komen board for directors said:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

In a statement released in response to the Komen decision Planned Parenthood said:

In recent weeks, the treasured relationship between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and Planned Parenthood has been challenged, and we are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership toward our shared commitment to breast health for the most underserved women. We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers.

Full text of both statements are below:

Full text of today’s statement from Komen:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics – anyone’s politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

Statement released by Planned Parenthood:

“The outpouring of support for women in need of lifesaving breast cancer screening this week has been astonishing and is a testament to our nation’s compassion and sincerity.

“During the last week, millions spontaneously joined a national conversation about lifesaving breast cancer prevention care and reinforced shared values about access to health care for all. This compassionate outcry in support of those most in need rose above political, ideological, and cultural divides, and will surely be recognized as one of our nation’s better moments during a contentious political time. Planned Parenthood thanks each and every person who has contributed to elevating the importance of breast cancer prevention for so many women in need.

“In recent weeks, the treasured relationship between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and Planned Parenthood has been challenged, and we are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership toward our shared commitment to breast health for the most underserved women. We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers. What these past few days have demonstrated is the deep resolve all Americans share in the fight against cancer, and we honor those who are at the helm of this battle.

“Planned Parenthood has been a trusted partner with the Komen Foundation in early cancer detection and prevention services. In particular, Planned Parenthood helps the Komen Foundation reach vulnerable populations — low-income women, African-American women, and Latinas — especially in rural areas and underserved communities where Planned Parenthood health centers are their only source of health care. With Komen Foundation grants, over the past five years, Planned Parenthood health centers provided nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams and more than 6,400 mammogram referrals. With the outpouring of support over the past week, even more women in need will receive lifesaving breast cancer care.”

By Julie Rovner, NPR NewsThis story comes from KHN partner ‘s Shots blog.

Two of the nation’s most iconic women’s health groups are engaged in a nasty fight that’s raising a lot of eyebrows.

The breast-cancer charity Susan G. Komen For the Cure is pulling about $700,000 in breast cancer screening and service grants from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The money isn’t massive by either group’s bottom line: Komen raised more than $400 million in 2010; Planned Parenthood’s total revenue that year was over $1 billion.

But it apparently marks a new chapter in the ongoing abortion war, not to mention the battle to defund Planned Parenthood.

Komen’s reason, according to the AP (the organization didn’t return NPR’s calls or emails) was a new policy forbidding grants to organizations under official investigation. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards confirmed that in an interview.

Planned Parenthood is the subject of an inquiry launched last fall by House Energy and Commerce Investigative Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.

But members of Congress who back Planned Parenthood say that investigation is little more than the same allegations that have long been made — and not substantiated – against the group.

“This is a trumped up investigation by some Republicans in the Congress who have a vendetta against Planned Parenthood,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Planned Parenthood’s Richards says she thinks the Komen Foundation has finally been pushed too far by pressure from anti-abortion groups. “I think what’s really disturbing about seeing these right-wing attacks on groups like the Komen Foundation is we can’t allow bullies to prevent women from getting the health care they need.”

But others say the pressure may have come from within the Komen organization itself. They point to the hiring last year of Karen Handel, a vice president who ran for governor in Georgia last year on a platform that included cutting state funds for Planned Parenthood.

Whatever the reason, it has outraged members of Congress like DeGette.

“I don’t see two groups at war with each other,” she said. “I see the Komen Foundation declaring war on women’s health.

Planned Parenthood has done everything they’ve been asked to do. And with their own private money, with 3 percent of their services or less, they do abortions, which the last I heard were still legal in this country.”

Anti-abortion groups, not surprisingly, are praising the Komen Foundation.

“The work of the Komen Foundation has life-saving potential and should not be intertwined with an industry dealing in death,” said Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life.

What’s your take? Is Komen right to pull funding for Planned Parenthood or is it knuckling under to political pressure?

Meanwhile, Steven Aden of the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal firm, said it “applauds Komen for seeing the contradiction between its life-saving work and its relationship with an abortionist that has ended millions of lives.”

But despite those plaudits, an even bigger question many are asking is which of these huge and recognizable groups is likely to win this fight?

Deana Rohlinger, an associate professor at Florida State University who studies women’s groups, thinks that while Planned Parenthood may lose this funding battle, it’s likely to win the war.

Planned Parenthood is “an organization that has been around for a long time, and this isn’t the first time it’s seen a hit to its bottom line,” she said. “It’s gone without before. And I don’t imagine that this is going to bring it down.”

Komen, on the other hand, she says, has been seen, until now, as more about pink ribbons and T-shirts than politics.

Yet “by taking such a strong move, what they’ve done is made it more about abortion, potentially, than about women’s health,” she says. “And that could be problematic in terms of people that support the Komen Foundation. You’re talking about a generally popular group, and some folks might reconsider participating.”

Local Resources:

• Puget Sound Susan G. Komen for the Cure (breast cancer advocacy group): www.pskomen.org
• Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest: www.plannedparenthood.org/ppgnw

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

By Merrill Goozner, The Fiscal Times
This story comes from our partner 

Julie Grabow, an oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, recently prescribed an exciting new therapy for a 60-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer.

Three-and-a-half years into her battle against the disease, the patient had already exhausted three different anti-estrogen therapies, each of which only put a temporary check on the spreading tumors.

The newly prescribed drug, Novartis’ Afinitor, is one of the recently approved targeted therapies that have generated a lot of excitement among cancer patients and oncologists in recent years.

Drugs that target just the cancer cells promise the same or better results as toxic chemotherapy, but with far fewer side effects.

There was a catch, though. Like many of the latest cancer drugs, Novartis is charging exorbitant amounts for the treatment – in this case, $10,000 per month.

That quickly put an end to that possibility for Grabow’s patient. Her monthly co-payment, even after her insurance company agreed to pay its share of the off-label use the drug (the Food and Drug Administration has only approved Afinitor for kidney and pancreatic cancer, not breast cancer), was $2,900.

“She can’t afford this, even though it’s potentially a less toxic and potentially equally effective regimen,” Grabow said. “Chemo will help her, and it’s a reasonable choice. But that choice is 100 percent driven by economics.”

Over the past year, official Washington and candidates on the campaign trail have locked horns over the best way to curb rising health insurance costs. The public has been bombarded with dueling slogans – Republicans vowing to fight the “death panels” and “rationing” of Obamacare while Democrats promise “guaranteed access” and “affordability” with the Affordable Care Act.

But an economic drama that neither side wants to confront is playing itself out in cancer wards and oncologists’ offices across the country.

Unaffordable new drugs, even when they’re covered by insurance, are being rationed by price as patients, doctors and hospital officials struggle with what is likely to be the most pressing problem for the nation’s health care system over the next decade: how to pay for the spectacular rise in the cost of cancer care, especially drugs and diagnostic tests.

“In the real world of private practice where most care is delivered, it would be a mistake to say rising costs haven’t affected care,” said Eric Nadler, a head, neck and lung cancer specialist at Baylor University Medical Center.

The growing cost of cancer care will impose its greatest burden on the nation’s Medicare system, since 55 percent of all cancers are diagnosed in individuals 65 or older.

A recent study by the National Cancer Institute projected the cost of treating the 29 most common cancers in men and women will rise 27 percent by 2020, even though incidence of the disease is going down due to successful public health campaigns like the war on smoking.

The study pointed out that its projections were based on 2006 Medicare claims data, which predated the development of most of the latest targeted therapies.

There’s no doubt that there will be many new therapies for cancer coming to market in the years ahead. The nation’s $150 billion public investment in understanding the biology of cancer – the science side of the War on Cancer launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971 – is beginning to bear fruit.

The pharmaceutical industry, which draws on that publicly funded science to develop drug candidates, now has 887 new cancer drugs in development, over 30 percent of its total portfolio of new drug candidates, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group. That’s up from 646 or 26 percent of the total devoted to cancer in 2006.

The industry is pouring increased research and development resources in cancer therapeutics in hopes that it will replace the revenue being lost from the expiration of patents on blockbusters like Lipitor.

However, since there are fewer cancer patients than there are people with chronic conditions like elevated cholesterol, and many don’t live very long, the prices needed to support the industry’s current size and structure, and profits must be substantially higher.

“They’re trying to maximize profits given their incentives,” said Peter Neumann, director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at Tufts Medical Center, which receives funding from the drug industry.

Possible solutions, he said, include letting Medicare set prices based on the medical value of adding extra months to life. That’s a variation on Great Britain’s cost-effectiveness model, which has been roundly condemned by most U.S. politicians and the press.

The other path is to turn to a bundled payment for every for every episode of cancer care and let the health care delivery organizations and private insurers sort it out. (Bundled payments account for all medical services associated with a given episode of care—doctors, nurses, technicians, etc.) That approach, in essence, would force the marketplace to execute the rationing.

“Bundled payment isn’t a panacea, but it does create incentives,” Neumann said. Some private insurers are experimenting with bundled payments for cancer care.

A quick review of the new cancer drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year reveals how fast drug prices are rising.

Most of the older chemotherapy regimens for cancer, some of which have been around since the 1950s, are generic and relatively inexpensive.

But among the six new drugs approved in 2011, the cheapest – Johnson & Johnson’s Zytiga for advanced prostate cancer – cost $44,000 a year. The drug extended life by an average of less than 5 months to 16 months, according to a company spokesperson.

At the high end of the spectrum was Adcetris, a biotech product from Seattle Genetics that treats recurrences of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A highly curable disease when initially treated in the 8,830 mostly middle-aged patients who get the disease every year, it is usually fatal if a drug-resistant strain emerges later in life.

Adcetris, the first new treatment to come along since 1977, kept the cancer in check for nearly 7 months in the single small trial that led to its quick FDA approval. It’s price tag: $216,000 for a full course of treatment.

Skin cancer specialists had a lot to cheer about in 2011 with two new therapies coming on the market for metastatic melanoma, which is fatal within one year for about 75 percent of the 10,000 people stricken each year.

But Roche/Genentech’s Zelboraf cost $61,400 a year and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Yervoy, which nearly doubled the one-year survival rate from 25 percent to 46 percent, cost $120,000 for a four-month course of treatment.

“We price our medicines based on a number of factors including the value they deliver to patients and the scientific innovation they represent,” said Sarah Koenig, a spokeswoman for Bristol-Myers. “We have one of the most robust patient assistance programs for cancer patients in the industry.”

Most drug companies have patient assistance programs for poor or struggling patients, but many only come into play if patients are poor or families have exhausted their savings.

And since many of the latest therapies, like the older chemotherapies they are replacing or supplementing, extend life for brief periods of time, patients wind up weighing whether they want to deplete their children’s inheritances for a couple extra months of being very, very sick.

A study released at last June’s annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which represents the nation’s 25,000 oncologists, revealed that patients with co-payments over $500 a month were four times more likely to refuse treatment than those whose co-payments were under $100 a month.

“The price of drugs can’t be set so outrageously high,” study author Lee Schwartzberg told Reuters. Schwartzberg is the chief medical officer at Acorn Research, which conducted the study.

“All stake holders have to get together and compromise to translate this great science into great patient care without breaking the bank.

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Zocalo Public Square: How Doctors Die

Photo: Hanspeter Klasser

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. … He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible.

Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little (Dr. Ken Murray, 11/30).

Photo courtesy of Hanspeter Klasser

Health Affairs: An MS Patient Loses Trust When She Finds Out Her Doctor Is Paid By Drug Companies’

Last year, four years after showing initial symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), I walked out the door of one neurologist’s office and, after several months of searching, switched to a different doctor.

It was the final act in a series of events that had gradually eroded my trust in the first neurologist’s judgment, which I believe was colored by his financial relationships with drug companies who manufacture and market medicines for MS patients. … Given my background in medical ethics, I was familiar with the potential conflicts of interest that exist for physicians participating in clinical pharmaceutical trials.

Assuming that my neurologist was being compensated for running the trial, in addition to his earnings from seeing patients in his neurology practice, I’d asked him if that was the case, and he confirmed that it was (Maran Wolston, December 2011).

The New Republic: More Health Care Heresy From Newt

Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich’s past endorsement of an individual mandate has drawn fire from conservatives. But that’s not his only health care heresy.

In 2008, Gingrich made the case for another idea that became part of Obamacare and, in due time, the focus of right-wing attacks.

Worse still, at least from the standpoint of conservatives, he did so by writing an op-ed for The New York Times. Oh, and did I mention he had some help? Gingrich had a co-author: John Kerry, the Democratic senator and former presidential nominee. … they also acknowledged that ultimately the private sector couldn’t solve this problem on its own.

More action was necessary, they said, and that action had to come from government … That’s the problem for Gingrich when it comes to improving the delivery of health care. He isn’t crazy. But plenty of influential conservatives are (Jonathan Cohn, 12/13).

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Newsweek: Could This Be The End Of Cancer?

By all rights, Shari Baker should have said her final goodbyes years ago. In 2005, more than a year after three doctors dismissed a lump under her arm as a harmless cyst, she was diagnosed with stage IV (metastatic) breast cancer … In May 2006, she traveled to the University of Washington.

The (cancer) vaccine was injected into her upper arm; she got five more shots over the next five months. Today, with scans detecting no cancer anywhere, Baker seems to have beaten some extremely stiff odds. …

By “cancer vaccine,” scientists mean something that will stimulate the immune system to attack malignant cells (Sharon Begley, 12/12).

The Atlantic: The Top 10 Health Stories Of 2011

Photo by Jean Scheijen

Coffee is good for you. And coffee is bad for you. Cell phones cause cancer. And cell phones don’t cause cancer.

Like any other year in health, 2011 was one of conflicting studies. In the end, we’re not always sure how to act or what to drink or when to exercise, but we do know more about ourselves and the world we live in thanks to researchers everywhere and the work that they do.

However broad or specific their conclusions, however small or large their sample size, medical studies do contribute to our wellbeing simply by existing and, if nothing else, by making us think twice about the things we eat, say, and do on a daily basis (Nicholas Jackson, 12/14).

Photo courtesy of Jean Scheijen

The Daily Show: Ed Gillespie

Jon Stewart talks health care with Republican political strategist Ed Gillespie (12/8).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

By Michelle Andrews

Medical tests can reveal critical information about a person’s health, but only if the results are communicated to clinicians and patients. Sometimes, the ball gets dropped somewhere between the lab or the radiology department and the clinician who ordered the test and the patient.

In Peggy Kidwell’s case, a mix-up over doctors’ names led to a year-long delay in a breast cancer diagnosis.

After her annual gynecological exam and mammogram several years ago at a medical center near her Virginia Beach home, she got a letter from her doctor saying the results of her Pap test were normal.

She assumed that she would hear from her doctor if anything untoward showed up on her mammogram exam and thought no more about it.

A year later, when Kidwell went back for her annual exam at age 59, her doctor, finding no mammogram results in her chart, asked why she hadn’t gotten a screening exam the previous year.When Kidwell said she had, the doctor investigated. Five hours later, the doctor called Kidwell to tell her she had found the results and it looked as though she had breast cancer.

The test results had been sent to an orthopedic surgeon at the medical center who had the same last name as Kidwell’s gynecologist. The folder had been sitting on his desk for a year, according to her gynecologist.

By that time her cancer had spread to her chest wall. Kidwell had a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. The following year, the cancer came back and Kidwell had a mastectomy.

She filed a lawsuit and eventually settled the case. (A confidentiality agreement prohibits her from discussing specifics.) No one, she says, ever said that an earlier diagnosis might have made a difference in the course of her disease, but she believes it may have.

Kidwell, who now lives in Silver Spring, blames the medical system for the mix-up, but also herself. “To this day, I don’t let myself off the hook for not picking up the phone,” she says.

Financial Consequences

More From This Series: Insuring Your Health

There are also financial consequences for providers when tests aren’t promptly reported: A recent study in the Journal of the American College of Radiology found that annual medical malpractice payouts for communication breakdowns, including failing to share test results, more than quadrupled nationally between 1991 and 2010, to $91 million. For patients, the missteps and mistakes can be life-altering.

Patient follow-up could make a difference in many instances. The study examined medical malpractice claims from 425 hospitals and 52,000 providers.

Of the 306 cases in which test results were specifically cited as a factor in a malpractice case, the most common problem — it occurred almost half the time — was that the patient didn’t receive the test results, cited in 143 cases.

The second-most-common problem was that the clinician didn’t receive the results, cited in 110 cases. Other problems included delays and slow turnaround in reporting findings and test results that were filed before the clinician reviewed them.

The study examined a different database as well, the National Practitioner Data Bank, to arrive at a dollar value for malpractice claims payouts related to communications problems, examining categories that would include getting test result information to practitioners and patients alike, for the period from 1991 to 2010. That analysis showed that payouts increased from $22 million to $91 million during that time, a more than four-fold increase.

Patient advocates and policy experts say the push for better coordination of patient care, including the adoption of electronic medical records, should help improve the delivery of test results to patients from doctors and to doctors from those who perform the tests.

“Health reform and payment reform are moving us toward integrating care to a degree that we don’t do right now,” says Diane Pinakiewicz, president of the National Patient Safety Foundation, a Boston-based consumer group. “The one constant is the patient. The best chance is for the patient to be part of the process.”

A Multilayered Approach

But doctors need a helping hand. In a given week, a primary-care doctor might need to review 360 chemistry test results, 460 hematology results, 12 pathology reports and 40 radiology reports, according to researchers at Partners HealthCare system in Boston. More than half of physicians surveyed some years ago said they weren’t satisfied with the way they handled test results, which typically took more than an hour each day.

Now many practices affiliated with Partners use a multilayered system that helps them manage test results. The Web-based system lets them log in and see all the tests they’ve ordered and the results that have come in, with those that are problematic listed first.

If a test result requires urgent attention, the system generates an e-mail alerting doctors; if they ignore this warning and subsequent messages, the system alerts the practice manager, who contacts the physician directly.

The system also generates letters that notify patients of their test results and has a tickler function that can alert doctors when patients haven’t had follow-up tests as ordered.

Even so, “nothing is foolproof,” says Eric Poon, director of clinical informatics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, part of the Partners system.

“No news is not good news,” he says. “If a patient gets a test done and doesn’t get a result, he should follow up.”

Please send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column toquestions@kaiserhealthnews.org.

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This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.