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Today J&J faces scrutiny from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

View original post here: FDA Inspection Report Cited 20 Violations for J&J

A report coming out tomorrow will recommend that the government intervene to put limits on the amount of sodium in food, and the FDA will act on that advice, the Washington Post reports.

Anyone who follows health IT knows that the Department of Veterans Affairs often gets high marks for being an early adopter of electronic medical systems in the U.S. Now a study in Health Affairs tries to put a price-tag on what the VA systems collectively called Vista, for Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture.

The method of making flu vaccines from chicken eggs is slow and expensive, but it has proved reliable for 60 years. So that’s what drug makers used last year in ramping up a new vaccine to offer protection from the sudden spread of the H1N1 virus.

The U.S. spent $2.472 trillion on health care last year, according to a paper out today in the journal Health Affairs. That’s $282 million an hour.

The feds say J&J paid kickbacks to a big nursing-home pharmacy company to get the company to prescribe more of its drugs, including the antipsychotic Risperdal.

The allegation isn’t a huge surprise: The pharmacy company, Omnicare, paid $98 million last year to settle allegations that it had solicited and received kickbacks from J&J in exchange recommending the company’s antipsychotic drug Risperdal.

The health-care bills passed by both the House and the Senate would both expand Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor. One important difference between the bills: The House version would significantly boost Medicaid payments to primary-care docs, while the Senate bill would not.

For patients with mild depression, a couple popular antidepressants don’t work any better than placebos, according to a study in this week’s JAMA that mined data from previously published studies. Earlier analyses have come to similar conclusions.

Swine-flu shots are going begging in Germany, and the government is selling some of its vaccine on the foreign market, NPR’s Shots blog notes. Only 5% of the overall population and 15% of doctors have gone to the trouble of getting vaccinated. It’s one of a few European countries where demand for the vaccine has been low.

Employment growth in the U.S. health-care industry is nothing to write home about, unless you compare it most other sectors in the economy. That performance remained intact in November as the the government reported health-care employment grew by 21,000, even as the nation continued to shed jobs.

Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics report and more from the WSJ.