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Speaker John Boehner was among those who promised Wednesday to get rid of the administration's regulation that would require religious employers, such as hospitals, charities and universities, to cover free birth control for employees.
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
Hospitals in Atlanta, Wisconsin and New York are consolidating or partnering more closely with others in a bid to reduce costs and save themselves. In other hospital news, small California hospitals market back surgery to patients and a Minnesota hospital faces a "patient abuse" crisis.
This post in the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases' "End the Neglect" blog reports on an event held on Wednesday in London during which John Kufuor, former president of Ghana and winner of the 2011 World Food Prize, addressed the U.K. Parliament "about how school feeding programs can help millions of people currently living in poverty." According to the blog, "In coordination with [the Partnership for Child Development (PCD)] and Deworm the World, the Global Network shared information at the event about combining deworming efforts with school feeding programs in order to strengthen agriculture, health and education programs," noting, "Parasitic worm infections often undermine existing school feeding programs by causing malnutrition and anemia even in children who are well-fed" (2/9).
Every week, reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.
In this study published in Health Affairs this month, researchers investigated the concept known as "additionality," where donor nations and philanthropic organizations "require that funds provided for a specific health priority such as HIV should supplement domestic spending on that priority." Using data from Honduras, Rwanda, and Thailand, the authors found that "the three countries increased funding for HIV in response to increased donor funding" and "suggest that it would be preferable for donors and countries to agree on how best to use available domestic and external funds to improve population health, and to develop better means of tracking outcomes, than to try to develop more sophisticated methods to track additionality" (February 2012).
Inter Press Service reports on a cholera outbreak in Malawi's Nsanje and Chikhwawa districts, located on the southern border with Mozambique, noting that government officials have attributed the outbreak to declining sanitation conditions as a result of flooding in late January. According to IPS, "up to 550 pit latrines were washed away in Nsanje alone, a district hardest hit by the floods," and "[s]ewage from the latrines has contaminated water sources in the district, including boreholes and dug-out wells, thereby escalating the cholera incidents, according to the assistant Disaster Management Officer for Nsanje, Humphrey Magalasi."
Rick Santorum again assails Mitt Romney's health care credentials. But, Santorum's presidential bid is itself finding some controversy for the candidate's ties to hospital chain Universal Health Services, where he was once a director.
"The health of millions of indigenous people across Asia is at risk, experts say, as lack of recognition of their legal status hinders data collection, making their medical problems invisible in most national health surveys," IRIN reports. "Indigenous peoples -- defined by the U.N. as people with ancestral ties to a geographical region who retain 'distinct characteristics' from other parts of the population -- rank disproportionately high in most indicators of poor health, according to the U.N. Secretariat Department of Economic and Social Affairs," the news service adds.
A selection of health policy stories from around the U.S.
Most physicians paint overly optimistic prognoses for their patients, and many have withheld information concerning their medical mistakes and financial relationships with drug companies and device manufacturers, according to a national survey published in Health Affairs.
Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations mainly focus on the controversy over the administration's new regulation on contraception coverage.
According to a new survey, 11 percent of doctors acknowledge they lied to patients in the previous year. Jessica Marcy has the story.
Phil Galewitz reports that the Obama administration launched a $40 million effort to reduce premature births, but it has no plans to stop Medicaid from paying for elective deliveries before 39 weeks.
Reports from Capitol Hill indicate that negotiations are marked by key policy differences -- some of which involve Democrats' negative reaction to GOP spending-cut proposals to pay for the package.
Conferees negotiating the legislative package to extend the payroll tax break and to prevent a scheduled Medicare physician pay cut increased their focus on the physician payment piece of the puzzle. Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing exploring private sector ideas for creating a new physician payment system.
Administration suggests there may be ways to meet religious groups' concerns but insists that the president is committed to the policy. Sen. Mitch McConnell suggests Congress may change the rule if the administration doesn't.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is among the five senior citizens who sued to stop their automatic eligibility for Medicare.
Rick Santorum snapped his four-state losing streak Tuesday with wins in three GOP presidential caucuses. Meanwhile, the GOP candidates are hitting front-runner Mitt Romney on the similarity of a rule he presided over in Massachusetts that required even Catholic hospitals to provide the morning-after pill -- comparing it to a recent Obama administration controversy on contraception.
In this post in USAID's "IMPACTblog," Ed Scholl, AIDSTAR-One project director, writes about HIV and tuberculosis (TB) care in Brazil, where "USAID has partnered with the Brazilian Ministry of Health to improve early TB detection, increase HIV counseling and testing, and provide medical treatment for both infections." He continues, "AIDSTAR-One, a USAID-funded project, is also conducting outreach in Brazilian prisons, which are often at high risk of TB and HIV epidemics." He concludes, "Through partnerships like USAID and AIDSTAR-One, we can effectively fight TB and HIV across Brazil and Latin America, to improve the health of countless people and ultimately save lives" (2/7).
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