Today's must read:

Former New England Journal of Medicine editor Arnold Relman, writing in the New York Review of Books, concludes things will have to get a lot worse before real health care reform gets enacted. . . .

In the news:

Various tax measures to raise the money for health care reform under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee are outlined by Kaiser Health News. Either a value-added tax (a national sales tax) or raising the Medicare payroll tax by .65 percentage points would raise $600 billion over ten years. . . . More customers continuing to buy brand name drugs instead of generics, minimal savings for the government. What's not to like in the drug industry pricing deal officially unveiled at the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports. . . . The New York Times suggests most of the savings will go to seniors who fall into the doughnut hole. . . .

Democrats are rushing to reassure cash-strapped governors that any insurance coverage expansion that goes through Medicaid will be fully funded by the federal government. . . . A new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine calling knee replacement surgery at $20,000 a pop a good deal for Medicare makes the paper. . . . But a meta-analysis in the same journal showing that using lots of Amgen's Epogen and Aranesp to raise red blood cell counts above the FDA-approved limit in dialysis patients does little to improve quality of life does not. Those higher red blood cell counts also raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes. . . .

President Obama, who smokes, signs legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products. . . .  Join the party: Walter Reed Army Medical Center launches its own investigation into payments Medtronic made to Timothy Kuklo, who is accused of falsifying data in a study of the company's bone-growth product. . . . And the benefits of coordinated care, patient engagement and a team approach to medicine through the so-called medical home are touted in this Jane Brody column . . . . 

The Los Angeles Times covers formation of a new non-profit group called HealthDataRights.org, which is pushing for universal patient access to electronic medical records. While the paper reports that its founder, James Heywood, also runs Patients Like Me, it doesn't reveal that the patient networking website is venture-capital funded and has signed data-mining deals with drug companies and other medical providers. . . .