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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.

Chris Christie, governor-elect of New Jersey, said his chief of staff will be Rich Bagger, Pfizer’s SVP of global public affairs. Bagger, 49 years old, previously spent more than a decade in the state Legislature, the the Star-Ledger notes.

Now you see it. Now you don’t. So it goes with Boston Scientific’s third-quarter profit as a result of a settlement agreement with the Justice Department that the company announced today.

As part of the stimulus bill passed early this year, the federal government started paying a big chunk of the health insurance premiums for recently unemployed workers. That’s set to start winding down soon, but there’s a push in some quarters to extend it.