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Four well-known budget gurus testified Tuesday in a public super committee hearing, telling the panel they should raise revenues and overhaul expensive federal health programs in order to develop a budget compromise that will meet the $1.2 trillion, 10-year mandate.
In this Washington Post opinion piece, Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cites declines in global child mortality rates as an example of how development aid works, and writes, "I am giving a report Thursday to the heads of the Group of 20 (G20) governments, including President Obama, suggesting creative ways for the world to continue investing in development despite fiscal constraints." Gates highlights three key ideas he hopes "become part of congressional deliberations over the coming weeks" -- first, "programs funded by U.S. generosity have been a core component of this 50-year project of raising living standards around the world"; second, "development isn't just good for people in poor countries; it's good for all of us"; and third, "the United States is not doing development alone. We spend about one percent of our total budget on aid, as do dozens of donor countries."
Politico examines this critical issue and offers scenarios of what might happen if the mandate is struck down. Meanwhile, in other health law implementation news, media outlets offer a range of stories, including reports on health exchanges, association health plans and how employers may view the health coverage landscape after 2014.
"Millions of children and women of child-bearing age in North Korea face malnutrition which can leave them at higher risk of death or disease, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday," Reuters reports. UNICEF urged donors to fill a funding gap to prevent a "nutrition crisis" in the country, the news agency states (Nebehay, 11/1). According to Agence France-Presse, "UNICEF had asked for $20.4 million for 2011, but has received just $4.6 million" (11/1).
"Nearly half of pregnant women do not get tested for syphilis in poor areas of southern China where the sexually transmitted disease has seen a resurgence, researchers said Wednesday" in a study published in the WHO's November 2011 Bulletin, the Associated Press/Washington Post reports. Pregnant women with syphilis can miscarry, have stillbirths or their infants can have congenital defects, the news service notes. According to the AP, the study "found that more than 40 percent of about 125,000 mothers-to-be in Guangdong province were not tested for syphilis in 2008, mostly due to a lack of health facilities in rural areas." The study noted that "several provincial and national programs to improve testing have been put in place" since the study was conducted, the AP writes (Wong, 11/1).
"Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the biotech start-up Amyris [have] developed a process to manufacture artemisinin, a crucial ingredient in first-line malaria drugs that until now had to be extracted from a natural crop called sweet wormwood," PBS NewsHour reports. "The new semi-synthetic artemisinin ... successfully entered the production phase through a public-private partnership with the drug company Sanofi-Aventis earlier this year" and "will hit the market beginning in 2012," according to NewsHour. Olusoji Adeyi, who runs the affordable malaria medication program at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the new formulation of artemisinin will help make better quality malaria treatments more affordable and increase access, NewsHour reports (Miller, 10/31).
The VOA News audio program "Explorations" on Tuesday discussed international humanitarian aid in the Horn of Africa. The program features interviews with Kurt Tjossem, the International Rescue Committee's regional director for the Horn of Africa and East Africa; Shannon Scribner, Oxfam America's humanitarian policy manager; and Nancy Lindborg, USAID's assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.
GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain is scheduled today to give a Capitol Hill speech that is expected to focus on his health care policies and positions. Also in the news, a Washington Post fact-check examines claims by Mitt Romney, another GOP candidate, regarding health care subsidies.
Although across-the-board interest in long-term care insurance policies has been low, the federal plan is the largest one in the nation - claiming 297,000 enrollees.
A selection of editorials and opinions on health policy from around the country.
State stories today come from Wisconsin, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Mississippi, Colorado and Florida.
In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the state officials made recommendations about new regulations and asked for coordination between federal and state leaders.
Without congressional intervention, physicians will face a 27.4 percent Medicare pay cut on Jan. 1. This reduction is slightly smaller than the earlier estimate of 29.5 percent.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also released the 2012 Medicare payment rates for dialysis facilities.
Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports about Tuesday's super committee hearing and the message communicated by bipartisan budget hawks to the panel -- raise revenue and revamp health programs.
"The world's population is expected to hit seven billion around October 31," CNN's Jaime FlorCruz reports in his column, "Jaime's China." This is a number that would have been reached five years earlier were it not for China's family planning policy, according to Zhai Zhenwu, a professor at Renmin University School of Sociology and Population. FlorCruz writes that experts at the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China say "the policy has prevented more than 400 million births in the country."
"Ugandan men have been seeking medical male circumcision in droves since the government launched a national policy in 2010, but the health system is not equipped to handle the caseload, slowing down the potential HIV prevention benefits of the campaign," PlusNews reports. A recent WHO report found that "just 9,052 circumcisions were carried out in Uganda in 2010, against more than four million men who would need to be circumcised for the country to reach its 80 percent target," a goal that, if reached within five years, could potentially avert close to 340,000 new HIV infections, according to WHO estimates, the news service notes.
"A $430 million fund which will give Zimbabwean children and pregnant women free medical care at public hospitals was launched Monday with the help of the E.U. and UNICEF," Agence France-Press reports. "The Zimbabwe health care system which has collapsed from years of economic crisis requires $436 million over the next five years to improve capacity, particularly in the delivery of maternal care, according to UNICEF," AFP notes.
The Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog" examines how religious leaders on the island of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, are using the Qur'an to shift attitudes about the issues of sex, contraception, and HIV/AIDS in an effort to reduce HIV infection, improve maternal health and curb rapid population growth. "Their aim is to shift deep-rooted views in their devout Islamic society that contraception is a sin," according to the blog. "Compared with the Tanzanian mainland, Zanzibar has half the rate of use of contraception -- just 13 percent in fertile women in 2011 -- and more than double the proportion of Muslims, at 95 percent," the blog notes, adding that imams' work to educate the population is working, as "contraceptive use has crept up from nine percent to 13 percent in the past four years" (Carrington, 10/31).
In this Huffington Post opinion piece, Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, examines the Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon partnership, which was launched last month by PEPFAR in conjunction with the George W. Bush Institute, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and UNAIDS with the aim of "integrat[ing] cervical and breast cancer education, screening, and treatment with HIV services." She continues, "Given that women living with HIV are at an increased risk of developing cervical cancer, it makes sense. It's a logical and critical part of what PEPFAR is calling care and support services." But while the initiative "has the potential to reduce the number of cancer deaths among women living with HIV and improve their overall health," the fact "that planning a family and preventing further HIV transmission is not part of what PEPFAR is calling care and support" is "counter-intuitive and counter-productive," Sippel writes.
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