Latest KFF Health News Stories
States Continue Epic Struggle Over What The Health Law Means For Them
Minnesota GOP lawmakers are being criticized by their Democratic governor for how they are trying to create a health insurance exchange. Elsewhere, California insurance rates are increasing as the Supreme Court hears arguments on the health law and a pair of protests targets the health law and unions in Missouri.
State Roundup: Minn. Can Cut Health Care Aide Pay; Ore. CCO Guidelines Released
A selection of state health policy and politics stories from Georgia, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Oregon, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Poll: Two-Thirds Of Americans Want At Least Part Of Health Law Overturned
News outlets examine polls and public opinion related to the health law and explore how much of a campaign issue it may ultimately turn out to be.
Pakistan’s Draft Bill That Would Punish Parents For Not Vaccinating Children ‘Misses The Mark’
“Eradicating polio and improving the health of millions of children in Pakistan depend quite heavily on assuring that all children have access to life-saving vaccines,” but “[t]he most recent policy prescription from the Pakistani parliament to improve immunization coverage, however, misses the mark, and badly,” Orin Levine, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center, writes in this Huffington Post “World” blog post. “A draft bill being finalized in the Pakistani parliament would require compulsory vaccination of all children, and would introduce tough penalties — including fines and imprisonment — for parents of unvaccinated children,” Levine says. However, supply issues may prevent some parents from being able to vaccinate children, and the threat of punishment may force some to falsify immunization records, he notes.
News sites reflect on the arguments being made before the Supreme Court about the 2010 federal health law.
Legislatures, Governors Contentious On Health Care Issues
In New York and Kansas, health insurance exchanges are under scrutiny.
Opinion Pieces, Blog Posts, Editorial Respond To Nomination Of Jim Yong Kim To Lead World Bank
On Friday, March 23, President Obama nominated Jim Yong Kim, a global health expert and president of Dartmouth College, to be the next president of the World Bank. The following is a summary of several opinion pieces, blog posts, and an editorial published in response to his nomination.
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
World Bank Presidential Nominee Kim Begins 7-Country ‘Listening Tour’ To Promote Candidacy
The White House nominee for president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, on Tuesday begins a seven-country “listening tour” in order “to promote his candidacy with stops in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Treasury Department announced Monday,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports (Crutsinger, 3/26). According to Reuters, “The Treasury Department said Kim will visit Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, New Delhi, Brasilia and Mexico City between March 27 and April 9 to meet heads of state, finance ministers and others to talk about priorities for the World Bank.”
“India’s inadequate government-run tuberculosis [TB] treatment programs and a lack of regulation of the sale of drugs that fight the disease are responsible for the [increasing] number of drug-resistant cases that are difficult to treat,” health advocacy organizations said in India last week, the Associated Press/Huffington Post reports. “India adds an estimated 99,000 cases of drug-resistant TB every year, but only a tiny fraction of those infected receive the proper” six- to nine-month antibiotic regimen, according to the AP. In India, government-run TB treatment programs only provide drugs to patients on alternate days, increasing the likelihood of missed doses, and patients increasingly are turning to private physicians who are unaware of how to treat the disease, Medecins Sans Frontieres in India and other health groups said, the news agency reports. “The Indian government had no response Friday to requests for comment on the activists’ allegations,” the AP writes (Naqvi, 3/23).
Cholera Vaccination Campaign Still Stalled In Haiti, NPR Reports
A planned mass cholera vaccination project in Haiti continues to be “bogged down in bureaucratic red tape,” as spring rains begin and the number of cholera cases starts to rise, NPR’s health blog “Shots” reports. The Haitian medical group GHESKIO and international health organization Partners In Health are organizing the vaccination campaign, which “is awaiting approval from a national ethics committee, which wants assurance that the vaccine is no longer considered experimental,” according to the news service, which notes the “WHO last November approved the dollar-a-dose vaccine that’s ready to be used in Haiti.”
India’s Public, Private Sectors Must Do More To Control TB
In this Lancet opinion piece, Madhukar Pai, a professor and tuberculosis (TB) researcher at McGill University and consultant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discusses TB control in India. He writes, “Much has been said and written in the media about totally drug-resistant tuberculosis
CGD Examines House Budget Committee Recommendation To Eliminate Feed The Future
In this post in the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) “Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog,” Connie Veillette, director of CGD’s rethinking U.S. foreign assistance initiative, discusses the passage of the House Budget Committee’s “budget alternative last week that calls for reduced spending for international affairs.” “Perhaps the oddest and most counter-productive recommendation is to eliminate Feed the Future but continue U.S. food aid, also known as PL 480, in its stead,” she writes, continuing, “PL 480 is not a long-term program to promote food security. … It is a ‘feed the now’ rather than a ‘feed the future’ approach” (3/26).
Today’s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports detailing what happened during yesterday’s opening-day Supreme Court oral arguments and previewing what’s on tap next.
Kaiser Health News is tracking coverage of the arguments, including reports about the justices’ consideration of whether the Anti-Injuction Act would preclude their review of the legal challenges to the individual mandate.
Opinion Pieces, Editorial Respond To Nomination Of Jim Yong Kim To Lead World Bank
On Friday, March 23, President Obama nominated Jim Yong Kim to be the next president of the World Bank. The following is a summary of several opinion pieces and an editorial published in response to his nomination.
South African Government Plan Aims To Eliminate New HIV, TB Infections Within 20 Years
The South African “government plans to bring down new HIV infection rates to zero in the next 20 years, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said on Saturday” at a World Tuberculosis (TB) Day even at the Goldfields mine in Carletonville, Gauteng, SAPA/Independent Online reports. “He said the National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and sexually transmitted infections (STI) would aim [to] eliminat[e] new HIV and TB infections, mother-to-child HIV infections, and have zero preventable deaths as well as discrimination associated with” HIV and TB, according to the news agency (3/26). Motlanthe also “launched a plan to diagnose tuberculosis in the country’s gold mines, where the disease’s incidence is the highest in the world,” Agence France-Presse writes, adding, “Motlanthe said the goal was to ‘ensure that all mine workers, particularly in the gold mining sector, are screened and tested for TB and HIV over the next 12 months'” (2/24).
U.S. Has Ability To Help Curb Effects Of HIV Among Women At Home, Abroad
The U.S. has “been working toward integrating HIV, sexual and reproductive health, and gender-based violence services for women overseas,” and “[i]t’s time we did the same at home,” Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, writes in this Huffington Post “Impact” blog post. With the AIDS 2012 conference being held in Washington, D.C., this year, “[t]he administration has already stated it will take lessons learned from global AIDS programs to enhance our programs in the U.S.,” she continues.
Health Solutions Developed In Lower-Income Countries Will Help Bring End To Aid
“It is not just quantity of aid that counts nowadays, but the quality and perspective of that aid, as well as innovation, investment and experience domestically,” Jonathan Glennie, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, writes in the Guardian’s “Poverty Matters Blog.” Noting a newly released report from the Global Health Strategies initiatives (GSHi) that says the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — are increasing their global health and development aid, Glennie continues, “Most of the BRICS are still developing countries in the traditional sense of that term, which means that they are combating extreme poverty, hunger and disease at home as well as in their aid programs.” He adds, “This is the main characteristic that sets them apart from traditional donors and philanthropic mega-foundations.”
White House Nominates Global Health Expert Jim Yong Kim To Head World Bank
“The White House on Friday named Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank” beginning “on June 30, when its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term,” the New York Times reports (Lowrey, 3/23). “Kim is a South Korean-born doctor, anthropologist and former head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department,” the Financial Times notes (Harding/Leahy, 3/23). “Kim helped found the international aid organization Partners in Health, which provides care to patients in more than a dozen countries,” and served as the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, according to NPR (Horsley, 3/23). At a Rose Garden ceremony to announce the nomination, President Barack Obama said, “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency,” the Associated Press reports (Pace, 3/24).
