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Merck Serono, Mendor sign blood glucose meter distribution agreement

Mendor, the Finnish diabetes technology company, continues its rapid growth and is excited to announce yet another international partnership - now opening the United Kingdom for its innovative products. Mendor has just signed a distribution agreement with a leading pharmaceutical company in the Diabetes field Merck Serono, covering the United Kingdom diabetes market.

14 Feb 2012

GAO finds big disparities in prices of some medical devices

News outlets examine a variety of health workplace issues, including a GAO report on medical device prices and efforts to get health workers vaccinated for the flu.

14 Feb 2012

Tax increases, Medicare cuts expected in Obama budget

President Obama will release his budget plan Monday, which is already getting its share of Republican detractors. In it, Obama will propose tax increases on the wealthy and $360 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, mostly in the form of payment cuts to providers and drug companies.

14 Feb 2012

Viewpoints: Rationing health care, Jindal and hospitals, Romney vs. past

It is time to begin open discussions about how to deal with expensive, minimally effective, medical care with patients, families, professionals and ethicists and not the medical industrialists who gain from prolonging life at every expense.

14 Feb 2012

Shortage of primary care doctors raises concerns

As the administration moves toward implementation of the health law, officials are seeking to bolster the number of primary care doctors. Also, hospitals are concerned about a possible measurement that would grade their efforts on patient safety.

14 Feb 2012

Two research studies receive HSR Impact Award from AcademyHealth

Research studies that helped shine a light on the impact of health reform in Massachusetts and industry influence on health care, respectively, were jointly awarded the AcademyHealth HSR (Health Services Research) Impact Award at the 2012 National Health Policy Conference in Washington, D.C.

14 Feb 2012

Knee replacements double in 10 years, study says

More than 4 million Americans over 50 have artificial knees, according to a new study. ... "These data are sobering because we didn't know what an army of people we've created over the last decade," said study author Elena Losina, co-director of the Orthopedics and Arthritis Center for Outcomes Research at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. ... Artificial knees also wear out after a period of time, so as the operations are increasingly done on younger Americans, many will live long enough to almost certainly need a second or even third knee replacement.

14 Feb 2012

Large NTD public-private partnership has greater potential than smaller efforts

The announcement at the end of January of the largest coordinated effort to fight neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) provides "more reason to hope that we may soon see a future free of these diseases," Adetokunbo Lucas, former director of the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, writes in a Daily Monitor opinion piece.

14 Feb 2012

N.Y. Times poll finds majority of Americans say taxes will exceed benefits

A majority of Americans say they expect to pay more in federal taxes over their lifetime than they will ever receive in benefits from the government, according to a recent New York Times poll. At the same time, the taxes Americans pay today are not keeping pace with the growing costs of government. Medicare is the program projected to add the most to federal spending over the next decade, likely increasing the government's annual budget deficits. But only one in five Americans surveyed named Medicare as the fastest-growing benefits program.

14 Feb 2012

Supply of childhood leukemia drug nearly exhausted

A medicine to treat children's leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals may run out within weeks; meanwhile, families of people with Alzheimer's disease are clamoring to use a skin-cancer drug after a promising study in mice.

14 Feb 2012

Hospitals: N.Y. Times finds aggressive debt collection despite charity care rules

New York's charity care system, partly financed by an 8.95 percent surcharge on hospital bills, is one of the most complicated in the nation, but many states have wrestled with aggressive debt collection by hospitals in recent years. Like New York, several passed laws curbing hospitals' pursuit of unpaid bills, including Illinois, California and Minnesota.

14 Feb 2012

States' Medicaid spending on target; Feds deny further Fla. Medicaid privatization

A survey says most state Medicaid budgets are on target through a series of program changes. In the meantime, CMS has denied a Florida proposal to expand Medicaid privatization there.

14 Feb 2012

The U.S. debates the contraception rule

A selection of opinions and editorials on the controversy surrounding the administration's regulation mandating insurance coverage for women of birth control.

14 Feb 2012

President's budget adds to CMS for health law implementation, cuts Medicare/Medicaid

President Barack Obama on Monday proposed more aggressive deficit reductions through savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other federal healthcare programs than the White House put forward just five months ago.

14 Feb 2012

CSIS report examines polio eradication efforts in Nigeria

This report -- titled "The Race to Eradication," published on Friday by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), and written by Jennifer Cooke, director of the CSIS Africa Program, and Farha Tahir, a program coordinator and research associate in the program -- examines efforts to eradicate polio in Nigeria, a country that "remains one of the most entrenched reservoirs of poliovirus in the world," according to the report summary.

14 Feb 2012

Fair trade agreement between E.U., India could impede access to medicine for world's poor

"Current negotiations on a free trade agreement (FTA) between the European Union and India are causing serious concern in many quarters over future access to cheap generic medicines used to treat some of the world's great public health threats: HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and also cancer," Philippe Douste-Blazy, U.N. special adviser on innovative financing for development and chair of UNITAID, and Denis Broun, executive director of UNITAID, write in this post in the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog."

14 Feb 2012

Despite contraception compromise, Catholic bishops, Congressional Republicans vow to continue fight

At Masses across the country Sunday, Roman Catholic priests blasted the Obama administration's compromise on contraceptive insurance coverage, a sign the White House's backtrack late last week did little to defuse the controversy. The new policy requires religious employers such as universities and charities to cover contraception in employee health plans but shifts the responsibility for paying for it away from the employer and on to its health-insurance provider. Previously, the administration had required all employers apart from churches to cover contraception in their employee-insurance plans.

14 Feb 2012

Crop failures, returning migrants, weather patterns threatening to worsen malnutrition in Africa's Sahel, Horn regions

"Sahel states are bracing for a long, potentially deadly hungry season, many weakened by the return of people from Libya who are unemployed, armed and creating fresh strife in already-vulnerable countries," Agence France-Presse reports.

14 Feb 2012

State roundup: Health law implementation in Alaska, Calif., mental health funding challenges, Miami's heart attack network

Alaska is one of several states suing to overturn the Affordable Care Act -- President Obama's health care overhaul. But behind the scenes, state agencies are quietly working on implementing various requirements in the law. One of those requirements is an exchange, which will work kind of like Expedia, but for health insurance plans. While the state studies its options, a bill moving through the legislature would also establish an exchange.

13 Feb 2012

High calories associated with memory loss in elderly: Study

Overeating may lead to a higher risk of memory loss say researchers. A new study found that elderly who consumed more than 2,143 calories a day had more than double the risk of a type of memory loss called mild cognitive impairment (MCI) compared to those who ate fewer than 1,500 calories a day. The study appeared Sunday by the American Academy of Neurology on its website (aan.com).

13 Feb 2012