Archives: Morning Breakouts

Accretive Health, subject of a recent report critical of its billing practices, will convene a panel of top policymakers on collection standards in the industry, it said Tuesday.

Patrick said he is confident the commonwealth can slow the growth of health care costs, although he did not endorse either of two proposals before the legislature. He also defended the effort to provide universal health care.

"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.

"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).

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).

"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).

"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."

"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.