Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The New York Times: Why Are Older Americans Drinking So Much?
The phone awakened Doug Nordman at 3 a.m. A surgeon was calling from a hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., where Mr. Nordman’s father had arrived at the emergency room, incoherent and in pain, and then lost consciousness. At first, the staff had thought he was suffering a heart attack, but a CT scan found that part of his small intestine had been perforated. A surgical team repaired the hole, saving his life, but the surgeon had some questions. “Was your father an alcoholic?” he asked. The doctors had found Dean Nordman malnourished, his peritoneal cavity “awash with alcohol.” (Span, 3/30)
Harvard Public Health: Palliative Care Could Be A Game Changer For Public Health
"Being ill is like a full-time job,” says Andrew E. Kaufman, a 60-year-old author. Kaufman lives with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, as well as other chronic conditions, and his self-care requires a lot of time—and communication. The cascade of his own needs “is frustrating and causes anxiety and a whole host of issues.” Lucky for Kaufman, he lives in California, where he has help from a palliative care team. California is one of the first states in the country to require insurance companies that administer Medicaid benefits to fully cover palliative care services for eligible residents. (Kleeman, 4/4)
The Wall Street Journal: Snapchat’s Friend-Ranking Feature Adds To Teen Anxiety
A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends’ digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it’s adding to their anxiety. Snapchat+ is the app’s $4-a-month subscription service. Subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign. (Jargon, 3/30)
Undark: When Infection Sparks Obsession: PANDAS And PANS
When Angela Tang's teenage son came down with a baffling illness, few households could have been better equipped to deal with it. The family lives in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. Both parents are doctors — Tang in internal medicine, her husband in infectious disease — and their son, a straight-A student well-liked at school, had been cared for by the family’s pediatrician since birth. Still, the parents worried as their son’s symptoms appeared, seemingly out of the blue, in September 2018: He’d meticulously line up pencils in groups of five, recite prayers unrelentingly, make homework illegible as he had to erase or cross out every C, D, and F. (Landhuis, 4/3)
The New York Times: What Happened When This Italian Province Invested In Babies
In a municipal building in the heart of the alpine city of Bolzano, Stefano Baldo clocked out of work early for his breastfeeding break. “It’s clear I don’t breastfeed,” Mr. Baldo, a 38-year-old transportation administrator, said in his office decorated with pictures of his wife and six children. But with his wife home with a newborn, one of the parents was entitled by law to take the time, and he needed to pick up the kids. “It’s very convenient.” (Horowitz and Pianigiani, 4/1)
