Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Americans Should Focus On Health Span Versus Life Span; Hospital Prices Are Clear As Mud
The New York Times: America’s Next Public Health Moonshot Should Tackle Health Spans
When I ask my patients about their long-term health goals, they seldom say they want to live to be 100. Instead they talk about aging with independence and dignity, being free from aches and pains or having the strength to play with their grandchildren. “I’d just like to blow out the candles on my birthday cake without coughing,” a 60-something patient suffering from emphysema told me. (Dave A. Chokshi, 9/28)
Bloomberg: Hospital Prices Are Too High, And Transparency Is The Cure
It is hard to get a straight answer about prices for medical procedures in the US, unlike in much of the rest of the world. The US also has some of the world’s highest health-care costs, in part due to insufficient competition. (Tyler Cowen, 9/27)
Newsweek: Will Amazon And Walmart Replace Our Hospitals?
The U.S. remains a bastion for health care innovation. We grow organs in labs, surgeons use augmented reality, and the Biden administration launched the Cancer Moonshot to reduce the death rate by 50 percent. So why are Americans getting sicker? (Derek Streat, 9/27)
Modern Healthcare: Maternal Mortality Is A Battle We Can Win
Maternal mortality remains a health crisis in the U.S., where in 2021 the maternal mortality rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released this year. That’s up from 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019. (Dr. Sean Tedjarati, 9/28)
Bloomberg: Long Covid Is Real. Now The Evidence Is Piling Up
Finally, the hunt for answers about long Covid is yielding some clues. A new study, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Yale School of Medicine and published in Nature, defines some critical differences in certain biomarkers of people with long Covid. The next step is even more critical: coming up with a way to cure them. (Lisa Jarvis, 9/27)
Stat: Stop Congress From Blocking Public Access To Science
Have you ever needed to read a research paper, only to find it was locked behind a paywall? Your next step was likely to search on Sci-Hub, an illegal repository created by Kazakh graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan, that provides free access to millions of research papers. While Sci-Hub is controversial, its widespread use points to a crucial question: Shouldn’t taxpayer-funded research be freely and immediately accessible to the public? We’re finally close to achieving this vision — so long as Congress doesn’t stand in the way. (Mayank Chugh and Jessica Polka, 9/28)
The Baltimore Sun: With Medical Mistakes On The Rise, Maryland Needs A Long-Term Plan To Boost Hospital Staffing
The latest findings on hospital patient safety in Maryland shows an alarming increase in what are termed “events” or, in plain English, medical mistakes that can (although not always) result in a patient’s death or serious disability. For close to two decades, Maryland hospitals have been required to track these errors with an eye toward making them less frequent. In the recent report from the Maryland Department of Health’s Office of Health Care Quality, a dangerous multi-year trend continues: The number of adverse events has continued to rise since the COVID-19 outbreak began. They have gone from fewer than 300 annually in 2019 to more than 800 in Fiscal Year 2022 (which ended June 30, 2022). (9/27)
Scientific American: The Complete Human Y Chromosome Marks An Opportunity To Move Away From Stigma
Early studies of the Y chromosome were tinged with eugenics. Some of the first studies of inheritance linked to this chromosome were conducted in 1922 by geneticist and eugenicist William E. Castle, who pointed to the inheritance of webbed toes as an example of a Y-linked trait. In the following decades, many other scientists ventured to connect the Y to an array of problematically framed human traits. (Christopher R. Donohue and Anna Rogers, 9/27)
The New York Times: People In Their 20s Aren’t Supposed To Be This Unhappy
The data come from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys of the C.D.C. One question asks, “Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?” The percentages in these charts are for people who answered 30 out of 30 — no good days at all. Blanchflower terms that “despair.” (Peter Coy, 9/27)
