Latest KFF Health News Stories
Walgreens-Express Scripts Spat Sends Many To New Pharmacies
A Walgreen official maintained a defense of the split even as rival drug stores have ramped up their marketing efforts to attract Express Scripts customers.
Supreme Court Considers Medical Leave Lawsuit
The high court heard oral arguments Wednesday in the case that will determine how the federal Family and Medical Leave Act applies to state government workers.
White House Staff Changes Will Tighten Circle Of Health Policy Insiders
Politico Pro reports on how this week’s White House personnel “reshuffling” will shrink the already-small group of people in the Obama administration driving health policy.
Gingrich, Romney Abortion Ads Question Conservative Credentials
GOP presidential contenders Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are trading blows on abortion with a series of ads that question each candidate’s conservative credentials on the issue. In the meantime, Kaiser Health News looks at the differences among the GOP candidates in how they’d reform Medicare.
Hospital Lobbyists Prepare Push Against Doc-Owned Facilities
A provision to loosen restriction on physician-owned hospitals found its way into the December tax extension bill, making the national hospital lobby wary that it may be included in the House-Senate negotiations for a long-term compromise. Meanwhile, as always, efforts to repeal Medicare’s SGR are complicated.
Judge Halts Calif. Plan To Cut Medicaid Payments For Medical Transportation
In other Medicaid news, articles from Georgia, Kansas and Colorado examine concerns about the program’s cost or planned changes.
State Roundup: Ore. Lawmakers Consider Medical Liability Reforms
A selection of health policy stories from around the United States.
ACO News: Cigna, Weill Cornell Docs Join Forces
Yet even as the latest accountable care organization effort is announced, it appears that plans have stalled create a Medicaid children’s version of ACOs.
Viewpoints: Recession’s Effect On Health Spending; The Flaws In Raising Medicare Eligibility Age
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
Patient Advocates Seek More Time To Weigh In On Essential Benefit Rules
A group of 75 patient organizations has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to extend the comment period, which now has a Jan. 31 deadline, until March 15. They note that the design of “essential benefits” will impact the entire health system and an estimated 70 million patients.
Longer Looks: Politicians Play Whac-A-Mole With Medicare
Today’s selections includes articles from The Washington Post Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Slate, Reason and American Medical News.
Promoting New Investments In Global Health Workforce
In this post in the Public Health Institute’s (PHI) “Dialogue4Health” blog, Jeff Meer, director of PHI’s Washington-based advocacy on global health, reports on the Frontline Health Workers Coalition, launched Wednesday, which is “developing support for new investments in the global health workforce, particularly those working at the community level who are the first and often the only link to health care for millions of people.” He outlines the Coalition’s targets and quotes a number of officials indicating “that the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress are coming to adopt the same view” (1/11).
Suing Others For Spread Of Disease Ignores Dynamics Of Infectious Disease
In this post in the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) “Global Health Policy” blog, Victoria Fan, a research fellow at the CGD, and Richard Cash, senior lecturer on global health at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population, report on a lawsuit brought forth against the U.N. on behalf of some of Haiti’s 15,000 cholera victims, writing that “the thought of suing the ‘sending’ government — Mexico for H1N1, India for polio, etc. — for the spread of these diseases seems absurd because it does not recognize the dynamics of infectious diseases” (1/11).
Ghana Likely To Meet MDGs, Development Economist Jeffrey Sachs Says
After visiting Ghana on a recent tour to examine poverty reduction strategies and progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and “one of the world’s most prominent development economists, says Ghana is proving to be one of the strongest performers on the [MDGs] in Africa and unlike some of its African counterparts is likely to fulfill them by the 2015 deadline,” the Christian Science Monitor reports. Ghana “has been investing for a long time in health and education, gender and equality, and it has made a lot of progress. But there are parts of Ghana that are extremely poor and really need a lot of accelerated investments,” Sachs told the Christian Science Monitor during an interview in Accra, according to the news service.
SciDev.Net Reports On International Forum On Development Aid Models To Take Place In April
SciDev.Net reports on Forum 2012, an international meeting to take place in Cape Town, South Africa, in April, which “aims to shake up donor-recipient relations in a quest for more enduring health gains.” The meeting, themed “Beyond Aid,” “will consider a funding model in which poor countries develop their own contracts and partnerships, and use their own resources, and how donors can support that model rather than just provide development aid,” the news service writes.
WHO To Convene Meeting On Yaws Eradication Efforts Based On Study Of Oral Treatment
“Findings that a one-time oral treatment to cure yaws, a neglected tropical disease, is as effective as the currently recommended penicillin injection have prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to convene a meeting on how the disease may be wiped out,” IRIN reports. “‘We may be closer now than we have been in decades,’ Kingsley Asiedu, a yaws expert with WHO’s Department of Neglected Tropical Disease Control, told IRIN, calling the study on the bacterial skin disease, which leads to chronic disfiguration and disability in 10 percent of untreated cases, the most significant in half a century,” the news service writes.
Wildlife Products Smuggled Into U.S. Pose Potential Human Health Risk, Study Suggests
“In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS One, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the EcoHealth Alliance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other institutions reported on the first effort to identify new viruses in wildlife products that had been smuggled illegally into the U.S.,” TIME’s “Ecocentric” blog reports (Walsh, 1/11). According to BBC News, retroviruses and herpesviruses were identified in meats confiscated at U.S. airports, “some of them isolated from remains of endangered monkey species,” and the “authors say better surveillance measures are needed to ensure this trade does not result in the emergence of new disease outbreaks in humans” (1/11).
“Unless steps are taken to eliminate cholera from Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic, the disease will likely resurge and could even spread to other parts of the Caribbean, international health officials said Wednesday,” CQ HealthBeat reports (Bristol, 1/11). Officials from the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), UNICEF and the CDC “said they would join with the Haitian and Dominican governments to develop a plan to eradicate cholera from the island the two countries share by extending clean water and sanitation to stricken areas,” Reuters writes, adding, “The effort faces a daunting financial challenge if it is to meet a goal of reaching at least two-thirds of the Haitian population by 2015, a task that could cost $1.1 billion” (Morgan, 1/12).
Bangladesh Works To Vaccinate 500K Children Against Polio In Annual Immunization Drive
“Mobile health teams in Bangladesh are conducting ‘child-to-child’ searches to reach the remaining half million children not vaccinated during a nationwide polio immunization campaign launched on 7 January,” IRIN reports. With a goal of vaccinating 22 million children, health workers are heading into hard-to-reach and high-risk areas to vaccinate the remaining 560,791 children, the news service writes. “Since a polio outbreak in 2006 of an imported viral strain, the government has not reported any infections, pledging annual polio vaccinations until [neighboring] India is declared polio-free,” IRIN notes, adding the next round of polio vaccinations in Bangladesh is scheduled for February 11 (1/11).
Nature interviews Amy Patterson, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy, which administers the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), about the board’s decision in December to advise against full publication of “two papers on avian flu (H5N1) [that] could pose a biosecurity risk if published in their entirety.” Patterson discusses the efforts of the board and the “international flu community” to “develop a mechanism by which important details from the papers could be withheld from the general public while remaining accessible to public health officials and researchers studying the virus,” Nature writes (Ledford, 1/11).
