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The House easily passed legislation that would fix a Medicaid "glitch" created by the health law that would have allowed up to 3 million middle-class couples earning as much as $64,000 onto the already struggling Medicaid rolls starting in 2014. The House also voted to adjust a definition that determines eligibility for certain health care programs.
"United Nations officials [on Thursday] called for concerted efforts to ensure the world's fast-growing population has enough food, stressing that global food production will have to double by 2050 when the planet is expected to host one billion inhabitants," according to the U.N. News Centre. "Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed that guaranteeing sustainable food and nutrition security for all will require the full engagement of governments and the private sector" and "said he was encouraged by the renewed political interest in food security, including the prominence that is being given to the issue by the Group of 20 of the world's largest economies," the news service adds (10/27).
According to a report published earlier this month in Virology Journal by a team at the bioinformatics laboratory of the Centre for Excellence in Molecular Biology (CEMB) in Lahore, Pakistan, that country is reporting more polio cases than Nigeria, India and Afghanistan -- the three other countries where the disease is endemic -- combined, SciDev.Net reports. Natural disasters, such as flooding, armed conflict, and poor-quality immunization campaigns have contributed to an increase in cases, according to the report. Elias Durry, senior coordinator for the WHO's polio eradication effort in Pakistan, said, "WHO is currently monitoring the whole [immunization campaign] and fully supporting Pakistan government as a partner along with organizations like UNICEF," according to SciDev.Net (Ahmed, 10/28).
Gov. Jerry Brown sought the waiver from the Obama administration to reduce reimbursements to doctors, pharmacies, nursing homes and other providers by 10 percent.
In this Huffington Post opinion piece, Orin Levine, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University, notes some of the parallels between the development of RTS,S, the experimental malaria vaccine currently being tested in Africa, and the polio vaccine, but he says "there are also some particularly disappointing ways in which the polio and malaria efforts could differ."
A selection of editorials and op-eds about health care from around the country.
The Obama administration cheered the news regarding the cost of Part B premiums in part because it could give a political boost to President Barack Obama's popularity among older voters.
This week's reports come from the Archives of Internal Medicine, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Urban Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Bureau Of Economic Research.
"[T]he number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, ... with close to 50 million people living below the poverty line," Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, writes in an Austin-American Statesman opinion piece, adding, "We desperately need a national dialogue about the unique afflictions of the bottom 50 million, paying particular attention to their neglected tropical diseases [NTDs], which represent important stealth reasons trapping them in a vicious cycle of poverty" (10/26).
Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports about the health law's public support, the latest on the super committee and news about the cost of Medicare Part B premiums.
Kaiser Health News tracked stories about today's HHS announcement that premiums for Medicare Part B coverage in 2012 will be $99.90 a month for most beneficiaries, a smaller-than-expected increase over the $96.40 paid this year by a majority of elderly and disabled beneficiaries.
A closed-door meeting is on the justices' schedule during which they will review petitions regarding challenges to the health law. Their decision about how - and when - to proceed could be made public as soon as Nov. 14.
As Republicans and Democrats on the congressional super committee swapped plans to reduce the federal deficit, the ideas they advanced demonstrated that the parties remain at odds over increasing taxes and making deep spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
"The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched a consortium on Wednesday that would allow the public and private sector to share intellectual property to promote the development of new drugs to treat diseases such as malaria," Reuters reports (10/26). "Under the agreement between [WIPO], ... the companies and the non-profit BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), public and private sector organizations will share valuable intellectual property (IP) and expertise with the global health research community on WIPO Re:Search, a virtual platform," the U.N. News Centre writes (10/26).
"Instead of worrying about sheer numbers when the world's population hits seven billion next week, we should think about how to make the planet a better place for people to live in, the United Nations said" in its report, "The State of World Population 2011," released Wednesday, Reuters reports (Ormsby, 10/26). "The world must seize the opportunity to invest in the health and education of its youth to reap the full benefits of future economic development or else face a continuation of the sorry state of disparities in which hundreds of millions of people in developing nations lack the most basic ingredients for a decent life, U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin said in the foreword of the study," the U.N. News Centre writes.
In this post in PBS NewsHour's blog "The Rundown," senior correspondent Ray Suarez reports on his time in Nicaragua with the NewsHour's global health unit for the national rollout of a pneumococcal pneumonia immunization campaign. The vaccine cost $100 per dose when it came to market in the last several years, Suarez notes, writing, "At that price, Nicaragua certainly couldn't pay to vaccinate all its children. The GAVI Alliance, formed as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, worked to find a way to close that yawning gap between great danger to children and a life-saving medicine, between deep poverty in Nicaragua and Pfizer's high costs."
Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), and Khai Hoan Tram, an Allan Rosenfield Fellow at amfAR, write in this Huffington Post opinion piece that what's missing from the discussion of foreign aid -- which accounts for approximately one percent of the U.S. national budget -- "is the fact that [it] is actually used to aid those in need while advancing our country's humanitarian and diplomatic goals. And it's working."
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