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State roundup: Maine, Minn. GOP want insurance changes

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) told an enthusiastic crowd at the Heritage Foundation on Monday that his Republican administration thinks "taking off the shackles" from insurers is the way to keep healthcare costs low for rural residents.

20 Jul 2011

Viewpoints: Suggestions for reducing Medicare spending; Medicaid cuts hurt; personal health responsibility

Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts. There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center. He floated certain ideas that would be normally unheard of from a Democrat.

20 Jul 2011

First Edition: July 19, 2011

Kaiser Health News staff writer Christopher Weaver reports: "New consumer-controlled health insurance plans could get seed money from the government to increase competition - and maybe cut prices -- under new rules announced Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services".

19 Jul 2011

USAID must overcome legal hurdle to providing humanitarian aid in Somalia

Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's office said the U.S. is willing to provide humanitarian aid to Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab controls parts of the country, but "in reality, her hands are tied by paperwork," Eliza Griswold, author and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes in a Daily Beast opinion piece.

19 Jul 2011

First U.N. emergency airlift arrives in Nairobi to provide drought aid

"The first U.N. emergency airlift flight arrived in" Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, on Sunday, "to assist the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled the drought and famine afflicting their homeland," ABC News reports.

19 Jul 2011

Swaziland's King Mswati urges men to get circumcised to prevent HIV infection

Swaziland's King Mswati III on Friday called on men in the kingdom to get circumcised to help reduce their risk of contracting HIV, Agence France-Presse reports. "Urging his nation to 'take care of your lives - stay away from activities that could give you the disease,' the king struck a very different note from his pronouncement to parliament a decade ago that HIV-positive people should be 'branded and sterilized,'" the news agency writes.

19 Jul 2011

USAID working with international community to respond to drought in East Africa

"Since October 2010, the U.S. Government has provided more than $383 million worth of assistance, including 314,000 metric tons of food," to countries in the eastern Horn of Africa region, where "more than 4.1 million people have benefitted from this help," Donald Steinberg, USAID deputy administrator, writes in a Huffington Post opinion piece.

19 Jul 2011

FBI struggles to uncover health care scammers who flee for Cuba

As Medicare crime spreads across South Florida, accused scammers are escaping in droves to Cuba and other Latin American countries to avoid prosecution — with more than 150 fugitives now wanted for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. health care program, according to the FBI and court records.

19 Jul 2011

UNAIDS' Sidibe calls for increased access to HIV drugs at IAS conference opening

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe on Sunday at the opening of the 6th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Rome "called ... for an increase in access to drugs that help treat or prevent the spread of the disease, saying it is 'morally wrong' to keep millions of people off lifesaving medication," the Associated Press/Boston Globe reports.

19 Jul 2011

JDR publishes study titled 'Public Health Surveillance of Dental Pain via Twitter'

The microblogging service Twitter is a new means for the public to communicate health concerns and could afford health care professionals new ways to communicate with patients.

19 Jul 2011

Study finds high C-section rates in Florida, New Jersey and Texas

A report released today by HealthGrades, the nation's most trusted, independent source of physician information and hospital quality outcomes, found that between 2002 and 2009 the C-section, or Cesarean section, rate in the U.S. rose from 27% of all single births to 34%, an all-time high. The highest rates of C-section were found in Florida, New Jersey and Texas, the lowest in Utah, Wisconsin and Colorado.

19 Jul 2011

Food4Me project to investigate potential of personalised nutrition

When the human genome sequence was launched in 2000, it introduced the possibility of personalisation in health care. Such personalisation can be applied to nutrition, a key health determinant, to create a diet tailored specifically for an individual, according to their individual physical and genetic make-up. Food4Me is a new, EU (FP7) funded project investigating the potential of this personalised nutrition.

19 Jul 2011

HIV vaccine discovery requires 'open mind'

In response to Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson's July 5 piece in which he highlighted several scientific "breakthroughs" in the search for an AIDS vaccine, Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, writes in a Post letter to the editor, "Although Mr. Gerson correctly noted that these discoveries are unrelated, he misperceived their relative significance."

19 Jul 2011

U.S. News & World Report ranks HSS as No.1 orthopedic hospital

U.S. News & World Report has once again named Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) the top hospital in the country for orthopedics in its 2011 "America's Best Hospitals" issue.

19 Jul 2011

U.S. FDA approves 2011-2012 influenza vaccine formulation

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has approved the influenza vaccine formulation for the 2011-2012 vaccine that will be used by the six manufacturers licensed to produce and distribute influenza vaccine for the United States.

19 Jul 2011

State roundup: Strain felt from home care, adult day care cuts

A growing number of states are shifting health care costs to the federal government by finding military veterans who receive Medicaid and signing them up for medical benefits through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Arizona, California and Texas are among the states that are working to replicate a program first launched in Washington State.

19 Jul 2011

BMC receives $1.1 million MDPH grant to expand HIV clinic

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) has awarded a nearly $1.1 million grant to Boston Medical Center (BMC) to provide funding for HIV/AIDS support and case management services.

19 Jul 2011

Employers Occupational Health receives URAC's full accreditation for case management

Employers Occupational Health, Inc., a subsidiary of Employers Holdings, Inc., has been granted URAC's full accreditation for case management.

19 Jul 2011

Married men with heart attack seek help sooner: Study

A new study implies that married men tend to live longer than their unwed counterparts, they're more likely to see their doctor regularly, and they even have a lower risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke. The study shows that men who experience chest pains while having a heart attack tend to get to a hospital sooner if they're married or in a common-law relationship. A woman's marital status, by contrast, was not associated with how quickly she sought treatment after experiencing heart-attack-related chest pains, according to the study, which was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

19 Jul 2011

Viewpoints: NYT on Medicaid's value; WSJ against exchanges; Chicago Tribune on food deserts

Medicaid is under assault these days from nearly every direction. Governors complain that they cannot afford to put up their share of the money. Congressional Republicans led by Paul Ryan want to reduce the federal contribution by $771 billion over the next decade. ... President Obama has expressed willingness to cut Washington's contribution.

19 Jul 2011