Web of Health Politics

Officials from 14 states have gone to court to block the historic overhaul of the U.S. health care system that President Obama signed into law Tuesday, arguing the law's requirement that individuals buy health insurance violates the Constitution.

Thirteen of those officials filed suit in a federal court in Pensacola, Florida, minutes after Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The complaint calls the act an "unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of the states" and asks a judge to block its enforcement.

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BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe,Aug 24(IPS)-Before, Zimbabwean families would take their illrelatives to rural clinics where medication was readily able andpayment plans lenient. But now they are taking them there to die.

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The House version of the health care plan will place a 5.4% income surtax on the highest income earners, and this surtax, combined with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, will raise marginal tax rates about 10 percentage points. This means that states with high state income tax rates, such as California and New York, will have combined federal-state marginal tax rates that will approach 60%.

Research I have conducted with Richard Rogerson of Arizona State University and Andrea Raffo of the Federal Reserve Board (click here to read more) suggests that raising marginal tax rates to these levels could reduce gross domestic product considerably.

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July 20 (Bloomberg) -- The leading Alzheimer’s drug discovery strategy being pursued by companies including Wyeth and Elan Corp. appears increasingly risky as new studies emerge.

More than a dozen drugs now in human testing were designed to slow progression of the illness by blocking the proteins that form clumps in the brain. While the medicines may reduce the levels of this substance, they have shown little sustained ability to improve memory or mental function. And a more complex picture is emerging from laboratories: the beta amyloid protein that scientists think kills neurons isn’t always bad.

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Australian scientists may have made a breakthrough in the battle to combat break-bone fever, also known as dengue, the deadly mosquito-borne infection common in the tropics. They found that the bacterium Wolbachia reduced the lifespan of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Dengue, which can be about 30 days in the field, by half.

Bolivia is facing the worst outbreak of dengue fever in its history. The mosquito-transmitted infection has killed 18 people and infected 31,000 around the country, according to the Bolivian Health Ministry. The infection is widespread in the tropical eastern lowlands, where the conditions allow mosquitoes to thrive.

WASHINGTON — Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.

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Medicare's trustees warned Tuesday that the program's biggest fund would run out of money in just eight years.  The prediction - issued in an annual report on Medicare and Social Security finances - offered the bleakest assessment of Medicare's future in years and reflects growing concerns among policy experts that the nation's health care spending is unsustainable.

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Medical personnel committed a "gross breach of medical ethics" by taking part in torture in Guantánamo, a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross document has revealed.

The 40-page confidential report, written in 2007, describes how medical staff working for the CIA monitored prisoners' vital signs to make sure they did not drown while being subjected to waterboarding, during which water is poured over a cloth placed over a person's nose and mouth.

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A Hampshire cancer charity fears it may have lost two years' worth of research work in Monday's earthquake in Italy.

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ATLANTA, April 3 (UPI) -- In 2007, 17.3 percent of U.S. adults under age 65 with private health insurance were enrolled in a high deductible health plan, researchers said.

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HARARE,Apr 4(IPS)-The resuscitation of Zimbabwe’s health care systemhas been identified as one of the major challenges facing thecountry by the country’s new unity government.

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INDIANAPOLIS, April 7 (UPI) -- A U.S. doctor cautions that medical professionals who see their patients die are vulnerable to compassion fatigue.

Those suffering from what began to be called compassion fatigue in the 1990s may create a distance from patients as a way of self-protection and develop symptoms such as chronic tiredness, irritability, lack of joy in life and destructive behaviors such as drinking to excess.

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There is only one real-life model in this country for the kind of sweeping change being considered in Washington, and that is in Massachusetts, where a landmark law signed in April 2006 has achieved near-universal coverage. And in that state, leaders decided from the outset to decouple access and cost, and to deal first with covering the uninsured.

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It comes as something of a shock to see the Journal of the American Medical Association now engulfed by a scandal concerning its handling of financial conflicts of interests of authors.

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A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him. 

The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.

And in still another case, a 24-year-old medical student at Lund University was convicted last April of raping a 14-year-old boy while he slept. A district court sentenced the student to two years in prison, but a higher court reduced the sentence to two years’ probation and medical therapy.

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Seriously ill boys and girls received substandard care at a children's hospital where a lack of beds, equipment and properly trained staff put patients at risk, the NHS watchdog for England said today.

Healthcare Commission investigators uncovered evidence that the safety of patients at Birmingham Children's Hospital, which is one of four dedicated children's units in England, had been compromised. Some underwent unnecessary major operations because the hospital did not have the equipment needed to treat them using a minimally invasive procedure.

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Scoring systems and competition can usefully drive efficiency when it comes to things like heating, buildings, catering and IT - but this has become entangled with the delivery of healthcare by clinicians. Non-clinicians have been incentivised to drive clinical processes that they understand only partially, if at all. Clinical process is so much more complicated than a business that buys and sells stock items. Yet we're trying to apply the same rule book.

What we've seen over the last 20 years is a systematic deprofessionalisation of doctors and nurses within the service. Those not involved in management are regarded simply as service delivery providers. We have seen the proliferation of management consultants within the NHS. But again, it is not clear that they have a true appreciation of the complexities of healthcare delivery. We are not selling clothes off a rack in a shop; it's not like that.

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Former Labour health secretary Patricia Hewitt is urging MPs to make it legal for people to take terminally ill patients abroad for assisted suicide.  The MP has tabled an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill seeking a law change "in line with current practice". BBC political correspondent Ben Wright said the government did not plan to change the law and the amendment, which has been signed by a handful of Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem MPs, was unlikely to pass.

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JOHANNESBURG – The death toll from Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic has now surpassed the 4 000 mark, highlighting the need for the new unity government to take quick steps to reverse the country’s humanitarian and economic crisis.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) that has led efforts to combat the epidemic said Monday that 4 035 people had died from cholera out of 91 000 infections since last August when the latest outbreak began. 

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BOSTON — Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted perhaps the boldest state health care experiment in American history, bringing near-universal coverage to the commonwealth with Paul Revere speed.  Threatened first by rapid early enrollment in its new subsidized insurance program and now by a withering economy, the state’s pioneering overhaul has entered a second, more challenging phase.

Thanks to new taxes and fees imposed last year, the health plan’s jittery finances have stabilized for the moment. But government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.

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Thousands of women and children are dying as a direct consequence of the current economic crisis which is already derailing efforts to improve maternal care and cut child death rates, the head of the World Health Organisation has warned.

Speaking to The Times after a meeting of world leaders hosted by Gordon Brown yesterday, Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO, said that risks posed by the credit crunch to poor nations were already taking hold.

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RIO DE JANEIRO,Mar 13(IPS)-The case of a nine-year-old girl who was raped andimpregnated by her stepfather has revived the debate in Brazil onsexual violence, the need to reform the abortion law, and theshortcomings of the health system when it comes to dealing withthe few cases in which abortion is legal.

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Is the economic crisis causing more suicides?

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Wal-Mart Stores is striding into the market for electronic health records, seeking to bring the technology into the mainstream for physicians in small offices, where most of America’s doctors practice medicine.

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Pay-for-performance plans, in which doctors, hospitals and other providers receive more money if they meet certain goals, are seen as a way of boosting health quality.

Researchers at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, studied a pay-for-performance program started in 2003 involving seven major California health plans and 225 physician groups who care for a total of 6.2 million people.

Although the programs appear to be speeding the adoption of information technology such as electronic medical records, these changes have failed to improve quality, they found.

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BAGHDAD,Mar 6(IPS)-Prompt medical care is at last on offer in Iraq,for those who can find the dollars for it.

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REGARDING that which he learns because of his profession, a doctor should “remain silent, holding such things to be unutterable”. So said Hippocrates, and although doctors no longer take his oath, their patients’ medical data are still confidential, protected by case law, the occasional statute (records on sexually transmitted diseases, for example, are extra-secure) and the General Medical Council, which can strike off loose-lipped doctors.

In the past eight years, says Barack Obama, health-insurance premiums have grown four times faster than wages. Every year a million Americans lose their coverage. The crushing cost of health care causes a bankruptcy every 30 seconds, and by the end of the year it could cause 1.5m Americans to lose their homes. In short, America’s health-care system is sick, and “there’s no easy formula” for fixing it.

WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. economy and other personal financial concerns are robbing some one-third of U.S. adults of sleep, a poll indicates.

KANO,Feb 14(IPS)-Six years ago, authorities in the northern Nigerianstate of Kano suspended polio vaccination campaigns for thirteenmonths. It was a major setback for eradication of the disease,which has since regained a foothold in Africa's most populous nation and re-infected several other countries that were considered polio-free.

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A woman with multiple sclerosis has lost her Appeal Court case to clarify the law on assisted suicide.  Debbie Purdy, 45, from Bradford, is considering going to a Swiss clinic to end her life, but fears her husband may be charged on his return to the UK.  This BBC report has an embeded video.

The fundamental human right to die will get renewed attention from Italy's politicians, as the country absorbs the death of Eluana Englaro, a 38 year old woman who had been in a coma since 1992. She died on February 16 after her feeding tube was removed.  The case is reminiscent of the Terry Schiavo case in the United States, which prompted family conversations about advance directives and do not resucitate orders around the country.

Three foundations announce a "mobile health" effort to use mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide.  The UN, Vodafone, and the Rockefeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance aims to unite existing projects to improve healthcare using mobile technology. The alliance will guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how they can save lives in the developing world.