Cutting the drug bill.

The Drug Control Bill

How beneficiaries fare under the new Medicare drug bill.

The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) provides the largest benefit expansion in Medicare's history while enacting major changes to the program's structure. Offering $410 billion in new drug benefits will certainly help many beneficiaries now struggling with the costs of prescriptions, particularly those with low incomes. It is difficult to determine, however, wh...

Cutting the Bill for Commonwealth Edison's Nuclear Power Plants: Important Gains for Illinois Public Utility Customers

Edison (Edison) agreed to pay its Illi-nois customers $1.3 billion, the largest refund issued by any public utility in United States history. The company also agreed to reduce its electricity rates by $339 million per year. This refund and rate reduction settled a decade-long series of cases with consumer advocates over the billions of dollars Edison spent constructing five nuclear power plants...

Molecular Informatics: Sharpening Drug Design’s Cutting Edge

The word ‘drug’, which derives from the Middle English word ‘drogge’, first appears in the English language during the 14th century and it has, at least during the last century, become, arguably, one of the most used, and misused, of words, becoming tainted by connotations of misuse and abuse. The dictionary definition of a drug is: ‘a substance used medicinally or in the preparation of a medic...

Cutting edge approaches to drug design

Going for gold To demonstrate the viability of this approach to manufacturing electrical circuitry, Kiehl’s team is investigating an assembly of gold nanoparticles into linear arrays on the DNA scaffolding. In their approach, a set of short DNA strands with different sequences are formed into DNA tiles that self-assemble into a DNA crystal.The particles are assembled onto the DNA scaffolding by...