Latest KFF Health News Stories
VA Hospital Incident Adds To Questions About Nurse Skills
ProPublica reports on this incident at a Manhattan Veterans Affairs hospital.
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
Today’s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including the growing partisan faultlines regarding budget issues, including spending cuts and entitlement reforms.
Reuters Examines Use Of Statistics In Public Health Ahead Of WHO Report
“Above all else, analyzing the state of the world’s health — be it by looking at obesity rates, cancer cases, malaria deaths, or HIV-free births — requires decent statistics,” Reuters reports in an article examining the use of statistics in public health ahead of the WHO’s World Health Statistics report. “The year’s report, due on May 16, will give data on everything from rates of measles deaths around the world, to the percentage of women who have no access to contraception, to the number or psychiatrists one country has compared to another,” the news service writes. “But some recent high-profile disputes about some sets of data have focused a spotlight on the way the WHO collects its data and compiles its estimates,” it notes.
Policy Innovation Memorandum Examines Safety Of World Drug, Vaccine Supply
“The world is facing two immediate health crises concerning drugs and vaccines: affordable and reliable access to life-sparing medicines and the safety and reliability of those medicines,” Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), writes in the council’s Policy Innovation Memorandum No. 21, titled, “Ensuring the Safety and Integrity of the World’s Drug, Vaccine, and Medicines Supply.” According to the memorandum, “Unless this issue is addressed, millions more lives and the credibility of medicines and vaccines will be lost. The Groups of Eight (G8) and Twenty (G20) countries should take the lead, as a matter of urgency, in promoting cooperation among national safety regulators, tougher legal frameworks, and regional networks of surveillance and prosecution” (May 2012).
Center For Global Development Blog Post Examines Debate On Whether Health Is ‘Fungible’
In this post in the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) “Global Health Policy” blog, David Roodman, a research fellow at CGD, writes about “the debate on whether health is ‘fungible,’ i.e., whether giving money to governments to spend on health leads them to cut their own funding for [the] same, thereby effectively siphoning health aid into other uses.” He writes, “Two years ago, a team of authors mostly affiliated with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle concluded in the Lancet (gated) that health aid has been highly fungible,” but “two physician-scholars at Stanford have reanalyzed IHME’s data in PLoS Medicine (quite ungated) and judged the Lancet findings to be spuriously generated by bad and/or extreme data points.” Roodman notes that he is continuing to analyze data from both studies and plans to “get to the bottom of the latest research on health aid fungibility” (5/14).
Women’s Rights To Family Planning Should Not Be Controversial
“There should be #NoControversy about a woman’s right to plan when and how many children to have, to have the opportunity to improve her own health and that of her children, to educate her children and to grow her family’s economic productivity,” Gary Darmstadt, head of the family health division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Wendy Prosser, a research analyst with the family health division, write in this post in the foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog. The authors highlight a recent TEDxChange talk by Melinda Gates, co-chair of the foundation, in which “she addresses the issues surrounding birth control and how it is literally life-saving for millions of women and children around the world.” They continue, “But of course, any time politics, religion, and sex are intertwined, controversy tends to emerge,” and discuss several viewpoints that have emerged in media coverage of the issue (5/14).
With Limited Budget, Prioritizing Investments In Projects To Advance Human Welfare Is Critical
“If you had $75 billion to spend over the next four years and your goal was to advance human welfare, especially in the developing world, how could you get the most value for your money?” Bjorn Lomborg, an author and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, asks in this opinion piece in Slate Magazine’s “Copenhagen Consensus 2012” section. “That is the question that I posed to a panel of five top economists, including four Nobel laureates, in the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 project,” he writes, noting, “The panel members were chosen for their expertise in prioritization and their ability to use economic principles to compare policy choices.”
Agreement On Voluntary Land Guidelines Shows Collaboration On Food Security Is Possible
“The endorsement of voluntary guidelines [.pdf] to improve the way countries govern access rights to land, fisheries and forest resources by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) on Friday marks a historic milestone not only for the way in which land tenure is managed, but also for international consensus-building,” Jose Graziano da Silva, director-general of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), writes in this post in the Guardian’s “Poverty Matters” blog. As the “eradication of hunger depends in large measure on how people, communities and others have access to, and manage, land, fisheries and forests,” and “weak governance of tenure hinders economic growth and the sustainable use of the environment,” the “voluntary guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests in the context of national food security set foundations that are indispensable to resolve these issues,” he argues.
FAO Committee On World Food Security Endorses Global Guidelines On ‘Land Grabbing’
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Committee on World Food Security (CFS) on Friday “endorsed a set of far-reaching global guidelines aimed at helping governments safeguard the rights of people to own or access land, forests and fisheries,” according to an FAO press release. “The new Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security outline principles and practices that governments can refer to when making laws and administering land, fisheries and forests rights,” the press release adds (5/11). “Giving poor and vulnerable people secure and equitable rights to access land and other natural resources is a key condition in the fight against hunger and poverty,” FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said, the U.N. News Centre notes (5/11).
NPR’s “Shots” blog includes an “All Things Considered” story that examines how “a 2009 benchmark ruling in Delhi’s High Court,” which “struck down a 148-year-old law known as Section 377, a holdover from British colonial rule that made homosexual acts illegal,” has led to a wider level of HIV outreach to Mumbai’s gay community. Vivek Anand, CEO of the Humsafar Trust, “which provides free HIV tests and other health services to Mumbai’s gay community,” said the ruling has helped health workers gain a better understanding of HIV prevalence among India’s gay population, the blog notes.
Insurers Have $1 Trillion Riding On The Health Law’s Future
According to a Bloomberg Government study, much of this new revenue would result from the health law’s Medicaid expansion and subsidies to help people purchase health insurance, and it all is contingent on the Supreme Court upholding the law.
Health Programs At Risk In Gathering Budgetary Storm
Deep spending cuts, scheduled as part of last year’s debt accord, are forcing lawmakers from across the political spectrum to consider difficult positions. Medicare and Medicaid will likely be on the table.
U.K. Reviving Budget Support To Malawian Government
“The U.K. Department for International Development [DfID] is reviving its budget support to the Malawian government after rerouting aid to non-governmental organizations last year,” Devex reports. “Ten million pounds ($16 million) will go to the country’s health system, according to a [DfID] press release [.pdf] published Saturday,” Devex writes, noting, “This is part of the 110 million pounds [$140.7 million] DfID previously agreed to provide in support of Malawi’s Health Sector Strategic Plan, which runs 2011 to 2016” (5/14).
Newspapers Examine Concerns Surrounding Possible FDA Approval Of Truvada For PrEP
The New York Times and the Financial Times examine concerns expressed by AIDS activists and members of an FDA panel that last week recommended Gilead Sciences’ antiretroviral drug Truvada be approved for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV among healthy people at risk of contracting the virus. According to the New York Times, “Such a pill has long been a goal of research, something that might help stem a global epidemic that is still causing two million new worldwide cases each year, including 50,000 in the United States” (Grady, 5/14). The Financial Times says some have concerns over the real world efficacy of the drug; whether its approval would encourage reckless behavior, such as not using condoms; side effects that might require additional treatment; the development of drug-resistant HIV strains; and the cost of the drug.
To Maintain Growth, Africa Needs To Improve Food Security, UNDP Report Says
“Africa needs to boost agricultural productivity and address the debilitating hunger that affects 27 percent of its population if it is to sustain its economic boom, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said [in a report] on Tuesday,” Reuters reports (Migiro, 5/15). In its first-ever “Africa Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Food Secure Future,” UNDP “notes that with more than one in four of its 856 million people undernourished, sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s most food insecure region,” the Guardian writes. According to the newspaper, the report says, “Hunger and extended periods of malnutrition not only devastate families and communities in the short term, but leave a legacy with future generations which impairs livelihoods and undermines human development.”
State Roundup: Undocumented Immigrant Health Care Showdown In D.C.
A selection of health policy news from across the country.
The Huffington Post’s “Global Motherhood” section continues to publish opinion pieces on maternal health to recognize Mother’s Day. Two of those pieces are summarized below.
U.N. Office On Drugs, Interpol Better Equipped Than WHO To Combat Counterfeit Drug Trade
“The worldwide counterfeit drug market is huge and growing,” Tim Mackey and Brian Liang of the Institute of Health Law Studies at the California Western School of Law and Thomas Kubic of the Pharmaceutical Security Institute write in a Foreign Policy opinion piece, noting such “drugs occupy a wide spectrum of medications, and their quality is suspect; they can be mislabeled, tainted, adulterated, ineffective, or, in the worst cases, all of the above.” They argue for a new framework for fighting the illegal drug trade because “[g]lobal policy has not kept up with the burgeoning counterfeit drug trade.” The authors say that although initial results of the WHO IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeit Taskforce) are “encouraging,” they note that “[s]ome WHO member states, including India and Brazil (both top producers of generic drugs) and other developing countries, have questioned whether WHO can rightly take on enforcement operations” because it “is not a global law enforcement agency.”
Calif. Gov. Brown’s Revised Budget Includes Substantial Medi-Cal Cuts
The ballooning budget deficit in California might mean hospitals and nursing will get less state money.
