Latest KFF Health News Stories
Ill., Providence, R.I., Make Deals To Save Money On Retiree Pensions, Health Care
Officials report accords with public employees restricting pension increases in order to keep the programs solvent. Both deals also involve changes to retiree health care programs.
Medi-Cal Enrollees Have More Trouble Finding Docs Than People With Other Plans
In other Medicaid news: In Oregon, Gov. John Kitzhaber has convinced the federal government that he has a way to make Medicaid treatment better, and Georgia faces risks as it moves all of its Medicaid patients to managed care.
Mass. House Avoids Major Changes In Cost Containment Bill Update
The Massachusetts House has revised its health care cost containment bill, leaving several provisions intact — including one directing the industry to cut spending growth in half by 2016.
Planned Parenthood Targets Romney With New TV Ad
An ad buy in Florida, Iowa, Virginia and D.C. was announced at the same time the organization’s action fund endorsed President Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports that the Obama campaign will increase its focus on GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts record.
Poll: A Third Of Women Fear Efforts To Control Reproductive Rights
According to a poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than four in 10 women have taken action in response to recent dustups on women’s reproductive health issues.
Feds Announce Effort To Slash Use Of Antipsychotics In Nursing Homes
An estimated 40 percent of nursing home residents with dementia receive the drugs, which are approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
State Roundup: Judge Rejects Calif. Request To End Oversight Of Prison Health Care
A selection of health policy news from California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah, Wisconsin and Texas.
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who convened the hearing, questioned whether thousands of Minnesotans who trusted their health records to Minnesota’s Fairview and North Memorial hospitals, suffered privacy breaches. The hearing follows an investigation by Minnesota’s attorney general into the relationship between Accretive Health and Fairview.
Health Savings Account Membership More Than Doubled Since 2008
The number of consumers signed up for high deductible health plans increased 18 percent in 2011, according to an annual census by the health insurance industry’s trade group.
Medicare Official Sees Medicare Advantage Enrollment Continuing To Grow
Jonathan Blum, the deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the director of the Center for Medicare, said he expects enrollment to increase at double-digit rates.
Longer Looks: The Cost Of Dying; Insuring Fertility
This week’s selections include articles from Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Economist and Salon.
House Set To Vote On Bill Banning Sex-Selection Abortions
The legislation would make it a federal crime to carry out an abortion based on the gender of the fetus. Anti-abortion advocates say the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., got the vote scheduled “as a concession” for agreeing not to try to attach it to the Violence Against Women Act.
“On World No Tobacco Day (31 May), WHO is calling on national leaders to be extra vigilant against the increasingly aggressive attacks by the industry which undermine policies that protect people from the harms of tobacco,” a WHO press release reports, noting that nearly six million people die of tobacco-related illnesses each year and tobacco is a leading preventable cause of illness and death worldwide. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said, “In recent years, multinational tobacco companies have been shamelessly fuelling a series of legal actions against governments that have been at the forefront of the war against tobacco. … We must now stand together with these governments that have had the courage to do the right thing to protect their citizens,” according to the press release. “More countries are moving to fully meet their obligations under the 2003 WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC),” the press release adds (5/30). PANA/Afrique en ligne reports that WHO has released a technical resource paper based on 2008 guidelines for implementation of Article 5.3 of the FCTC “to help guide countries on ways to combat tobacco industry interference” (5/30).
Guardian’s International Development Journalism Competition
The Guardian has published the “longlisted” amateur and professional entries for its International Development Journalism competition. Topics of the amateur entries include the health of prisoners in Kenya, health worker shortages, and unprotected sex in South Sudan. Topics of the professional entries include maternal mortality, the “brain drain” phenomenon, and Uganda’s health care crisis (5/30).
Member states at the 65th session of the World Health Assembly, which concluded last week, “agreed to adopt a global target of a 25 percent reduction in premature mortality from non-communicable diseases [NCDs] such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases by 2025,” Devi Sridhar, a lecturer in Global Health Politics at Oxford University; Lawrence Gostin, professor of law at Georgetown University, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and director of the WHO’s Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights; and Derek Yach, senior vice president of global health and agricultural policy at PepsiCo and former executive of the WHO, write in the journal Global Health Governance. The authors discuss the basis on which the target was set and examine what will need to be done, and by whom, in order to achieve the goal.
Large-Scale, Coordinated Effort Needed To Stop Increase In HIV Transmission Among MSM In China
HIV transmission in China is increasing faster among men who have sex with men (MSM) than in any other population, a trend that “cannot continue,” a group of researchers working in China write in a Nature commentary, adding, “Policymakers, public health researchers, clinicians, educators, community leaders and other stakeholders in China must come together to educate everyone, and gay men in particular, about HIV prevention and treatment — before any more people become infected as a result of ignorance and fear.” They continue, “Chinese people aren’t uncomfortable just in discussing homosexuality” but “sex in general,” which has resulted in “a pervasive stigma against people with HIV, a lack of general sex education for young people, and poor epidemiological data about the spread of HIV in some populations around the country,” as well as “a hidden population of individuals who are afraid to seek out HIV information resources or testing and counseling centers.”
Opinion Pieces, Editorial Discuss Significant Decline In Child Mortality In Sub-Saharan Africa
The following summaries of two opinion pieces and an editorial explore a recent paper published by the World Bank discussing significant declines in infant and under-five mortality in Kenya and across sub-Saharan Africa.
