Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Atul Gawande On Overtreatment; Computer-Generated Kidney Swaps
The New Yorker: Overkill
Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. ... Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm. Why does this fact barely seem to register publicly? Well, as a doctor, I am far more concerned about doing too little than doing too much. It’s the scan, the test, the operation that I should have done that sticks with me. ... It is different, however, when I think about my experience as a patient or a family member. I can readily recall a disturbing number of instances of unnecessary care. (Atul Gawande, 5/11)
The New York Times: The Great American Kidney Swap
A law-abiding American in need of a kidney has two options. The first is to wait on the national list for an organ donor to die in (or near) a hospital. The second is to find a person willing to donate a kidney to you. More than half the time, such donor-and-recipient pairs are incompatible .... The genius of the computer algorithms driving the kidney chains is that they find the best medical matches — thus increasing the odds of a successful transplant — by decoupling donors from their intended recipients. In the United States, half a dozen of these software programs allow for a kind of barter market for kidneys. This summer, doctors will most likely complete the last two operations in a record-breaking 70-person chain that involved flying donated kidneys on commercial airlines to several hospitals across the country. (Malia Wollan, 4/30)
The Associated Press: Black Mothers Wonder If Their Lost Babies Are Still Alive
Eighteen black women who were told decades ago that their babies had died soon after birth at a St. Louis hospital now wonder if the infants were taken away by hospital officials to be raised by other families. The suspicions arose from the story of Zella Jackson Price, who said she was 26 in 1965 when she gave birth at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. Hours later, she was told that her daughter had died, but she never saw a body or a death certificate. (Jim Salter, 5/2)
The Atlantic: When an HIV Crisis Trumps Ideology On Drug Policy
While HIV/AIDS prevention is more frequently discussed in the context of safe-sex practices, the virus's transmission among intravenous drug users has sparked a debate about needle-exchange programs since the onset of the epidemic in the early 1980s, said William McColl, director of health policy at AIDS United. The policy has always been a tough sell politically in the "Just Say No" culture toward drugs. (Russell Berman, 4/30)
The Washington Post: The Painful Price Of Aging In Prison
The aging of the prison population is driving health-care costs being borne by American taxpayers. The Bureau of Prisons saw health-care expenses for inmates increase 55 percent from 2006 to 2013, when it spent more than $1 billion. That figure is nearly equal to the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, who is conducting a review of the impact of the aging inmate population on prison activities, housing and costs. (Sari Horwitz, 5/2)
