Latest KFF Health News Stories
Viewpoints: The ‘Need’ To Repeal CLASS; Squaring Romney’s Poverty And Tax Promises
A selection of editorials and opinions on health care policy from around the country.
Extending Payroll Tax Cut Tops Congressional To-Do List
A quick deal on this legislative challenge could result in a short-term Medicare “doc fix” and raises red flags for hospitals, which fear reimbursements could be cut.
Medicaid News: N.Y. Gov. Proposes State ‘Takeover’ Of Local Costs
In New York, Kansas, Georgia, Arizona and Texas, Medicaid is making news.
Detroit To Get New Hospital; Dallas’ Parkland Hospital Safety Report ‘Imminent’
A selection of hospital news from Michigan, Texas, California and Rhode Island.
An Increasing Number Of Americans Rely On Government Benefits
The Wall Street Journal reports on Census data indicating that, during the second quarter of 2010, just under half of U.S. households received some form of government benefits.
NGOs In Balkan Countries To Establish Regional Body To Fight HIV/AIDS Stigma, Discrimination
Agence France-Presse reports that a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is working to establish a regional association to combat HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination that is prevalent in the Balkan countries. “‘The pervasive stigma and discrimination by health care providers and society at large against high-risk populations — and self-imposed isolation of people living with HIV and AIDS — further fuels the growth of the epidemic’ in the western Balkans, a health NGO, Fondation PH Suisse, said in a 2010 report,” the news service writes. According to AFP, the groups will officially launch the initiative in April at an HIV/AIDS conference (Markovic, 1/13).
First Edition: January 18, 2012
Today’s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including a report about the number of people in the U.S. who live in households receiving government benefits.
Congress Returns To Work On D.C. With ‘Doc Fix,’ Tax Cuts
The Associated Press reports that in order to prevent a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors under the 1997 formula, negotiators are trying to find $39 billion in cuts elsewhere in health care spending. That would fix the problem for two years. A deal could be reached faster than initially expected.
PCORI To Release National Priorities For Medical Effectiveness Research
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, an independent board established by the health law, will meet this week to set priorities for “comparative effectiveness research.” In other news related to the health law, the NewsHour reports on how the overahul has impacted pediatric cancer patients and the New York Times reports on the law’s provisions related to screening kids for obesity and providing them counseling.
Global Fund Executive Director Urges Ukraine To Step Up Efforts To Fight HIV/AIDS
Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, on Monday “urged Ukraine to step up its efforts to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” calling “on the Ukrainian authorities to expand opiate substitution therapy, ensure HIV/AIDS treatment in prison and increase government funding of anti-AIDS programs,” the Associated Press reports. “‘This is the region of the world — the only region of the world — where the AIDS epidemic is still growing,’ Kazatchkine told reporters in Kiev, adding that other countries have managed to stabilize their epidemics,” the news service writes. “The United Nations says Ukraine has Europe’s worst AIDS epidemic, with 1.3 percent of the population above [age] 15 infected with HIV,” according to the AP (1/16).
India Applauded For Marking One Year Without Polio, But Urged To Also Focus On Other Diseases
In this post in the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) “Global Health Policy” blog, Victoria Fan, a research fellow at CGD, and Rachel Silverman, a research assistant at the center, respond to India’s marking of one-year since a case of polio was found in the country, writing, “While we applaud India for its commitment to reaching this milestone, let us not allow this recent success obscure the sorry state of vaccination in India.” They provide statistics regarding vaccination coverage in India and conclude, “We wonder whether India’s focus on polio may have come at the expense of other diseases,” and, “[w]hile India should be applauded for its contribution to global eradication, we urge India to consider the trade-offs in focusing on any one disease at the expense of another and, as much as possible, to try to piggy-back one effort to another effort” (1/14).
Gates, Kristof Answer Questions About Bangladesh, Public Health In Final Installment Of Blog Series
Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continue to answer readers’ questions in this third and final installment of the series on Kristof’s “On the Ground” blog. Gates and Kristof answer questions about assessing and incorporating the needs of women and children in Bangladesh into development initiatives and discuss the global health activities about which they are most excited and optimistic (1/13).
GlobalPost Blog Reports On Roundtable Discussing Country Ownership Of Development Aid
GlobalPost’s “Global Pulse” blog reports on a roundtable held on Thursday and organized by the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health (MLI) — a “five-year project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation” — at which “U.S. officials, developing country leaders, and heads of non-governmental organizations that do tens of millions of dollars of work in health around the world” discussed country ownership with respect to development aid. According to the blog, “several senior U.S. officials said they were committed to building up country ownership, along with systems that closely monitor spending” (Donnelly, 1/13).
Bloomberg Examines Effects Of Financial Crisis On Global Health
Bloomberg examines the effects of the global financial crisis and a resulting stall in development aid for global health programs, writing, “Governments struggling to curb deficits from Spain to the U.S. have cut or slowed the growth of their contributions to the World Health Organization and disease-fighting funds that prop up health services in the world’s poorest countries, according to a report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research unit at the University of Washington in Seattle.”
WHO To Take Lead Role In Addressing Controversial Bird Flu Research, Official Says
“The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government deemed too dangerous to publish in full,” the Canadian Press/Winnipeg Free Press reports. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security and environment, on Sunday in an interview with the Canadian Press “said the agency will pull together international talks aimed at fleshing out the issues that need to be addressed and then work to resolve them.” On the advice of the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity (NSABB), the journals Science and Nature “have grudgingly agreed to abbreviate the papers, leaving out the details of how the work was done,” according to the news service.
WHO’s Chan Urges New Approach To Preventing, Fighting NCDs At Executive Board Meeting
“Countries need to change their current mindset to successfully tackle non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) said [Monday], adding that governments will need to explore new approaches to prevent and treat these diseases, which have quickly become one of the most pressing issues in public health,” the U.N. News Centre reports (1/16). “In an opening speech to the annual WHO Executive Board meeting, Director-General Margaret Chan … urged the 34-member board to tackle the root causes of non-communicable diseases,” VOA News writes (Schlein, 1/16).
U.N.’s Somalia Official Says ‘Tens Of Thousands’ Of Somalis Died From Malnutrition Over Last Year
Mark Bowden, the U.N.’s official in Somalia, on Sunday said “tens of thousands of people will have died over the last year” in the country’s famine, adding that the rates of malnutrition are “amazingly high,” BBC News reports. “He said a quarter of a million Somalis were still suffering from the famine,” and he “said malnutrition rates have begun to drop but the crisis was likely to continue for the next six or seven months,” the news service notes (1/15).
Chan Faces Financing Challenges In Second Term As WHO Director-General
The expected re-appointment of Margaret Chan as the WHO’s director-general “comes at a perilous moment for WHO,” a Lancet editorial states. Although “WHO is in crisis” and “[r]escue is needed,” the situation is not “a fair reflection of the director-general’s performance,” the editorial adds, noting several successes of her first term, including initiatives on women’s and children’s health and non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
“Hopes of controlling malaria in Africa could be wrecked by criminals who are circulating counterfeit and substandard drugs, threatening millions of lives, scientists” said in a study published in the Malaria Journal last month, the Guardian reports. “They are calling for public health authorities to take urgent action to preserve the efficacy of the antimalarials now being used in the worst-hit areas of the continent,” the newspaper adds (Boseley, 1/16). “The counterfeit medicines could harm patients and promote drug resistance among malaria parasites, warns the study, funded by the Wellcome Trust,” BBC News writes (1/16).
Indian, WHO Officials To Meet To Discuss Managing Cases Of Highly Drug-Resistant TB
Health officials from India and the WHO are scheduled to meet in Mumbai on Tuesday to discuss how to manage the cases of at least 12 patients infected with a highly drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) strain, Bloomberg reports (Narayan, 1/17). “The ‘totally drug-resistant’ tuberculosis (TDR-TB) reportedly emerging in India is actually an advanced stage of drug-resistant TB, which researchers called totally drug-resistant for lack of a better term,” IRIN notes (1/17).
