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Government-run insurance program gets Presidential push

President Barack Obama yesterday detailed his support for "government-run insurance program that would compete with private insurers," CQ Politics reports.

4 Jun 2009

Indian Health Service loses equipment at alarming rate

The Associated Press reports that "the Indian Health Service is continuing to lose equipment at an alarming rate despite efforts to better account for the agency's property, according to congressional investigators.

4 Jun 2009

President Obama "open" to coverage mandate for all Americans

President Obama on Wednesday signaled in a letter to top Senate Democrats that he may be open to requiring all Americans to have health insurance coverage as part of health care reform.

4 Jun 2009

Health reform debate players weigh in on their roles

ABC News says Dr. Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel, special health adviser to the president's budget director, "has emerged as a key behind-the-scenes player for what could be the biggest overhaul of the nation's health care system in the past two decades." The brother of President Obama's chief of staff and is nervous that something could go wrong in the process.

4 Jun 2009

GOP: public plan option big obstacle to health reform

Democrats and Republicans moved further apart this afternoon over the possibility of including a public plan in any health care reform legislation.

4 Jun 2009

Congress unlikely to approve Obama's request for additional flu money, majority leader says

U.S House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Wednesday expressed skepticism that Congress would approve President Obama's recent request for an additional $2 billion to help fight the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, Reuters/Washington Post reports.

4 Jun 2009

Report examines Zimbabwean refugees In South Africa

According to a report released Tuesday by Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), "Zimbabweans continue to cross the border [into South Africa] every day, legally and illegally, in massive numbers as a matter of survival," AFP/Google.com reports (AFP/Google.com, 6/2).

4 Jun 2009

Experimental drug five times more effective against MDR-TB than conventional therapy

A Johnson & Johnson-run study found that its experimental drug TMC207 could make conventional tuberculosis treatment five times more effective against multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) because it cleared traces of the TB bacteria in the sputum of 48 percent of study volunteers after eight weeks, Reuters reports (Emery, Reuters, 6/3). The results were published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

4 Jun 2009

Combination of interventions could reduce childhood pneumonia deaths by 90%, study says

A combination of measures taken to improve nutrition, indoor air pollution, immunization and child pneumonia case management could reduce total child mortality worldwide by 17 percent and global pneumonia deaths by more than 90 percent, according to a study published in the June issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, UPI reports.

4 Jun 2009

Opinion: Governments must take 'concrete action' to reduce maternal mortality, morbidity

With the U.N. Human Rights Council's June session coming up, governments have a "chance to prove that they value women's lives by taking concrete action" to recognize "preventable maternal death as a violation of women's rights," Mary Robinson and Alicia Yamin, advisory council members of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, write in a Boston Globe opinion piece.

4 Jun 2009

Mozambique's Health Minister reviews country's health status with Parliament

A nationwide vaccination effort in Mozambique helped to slash the number of reported cases of measles in Mozambique in 2008, Health Minister Ivo Garrido said Wednesday when addressing the country's parliament, Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique/allAfrica.com reports.

4 Jun 2009

African health advocates meet in Kenya to discuss need for governments to improve basic healthcare services

Health advocates at a civil society meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, called for African governments to improve access to basic health care, IRIN reports. "African governments are failing to offer even the most basic healthcare that could save lives, speakers warned," writes IRIN.

4 Jun 2009

Discovery of new genetic immune disorder in children

Your immune system plays an important function in your health - it protects you against viruses, bacteria, and other toxins that can cause disease. In autoinflammatory diseases, however, the immune system goes awry, causing unprovoked and dangerous inflammation.

4 Jun 2009

Report says 650,000 cancer deaths avoided between 1990 and 2005

The American Cancer Society's annual cancer statistics report finds that 15 years of steady declines in overall cancer death rates translate to about 650,000 deaths from cancer avoided or delayed during that time period. The estimate comes from 'Cancer Statistics 2009,' published early online and appearing in the July/August print issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

4 Jun 2009

Research looks at bariatric surgery waiting times in Canada

Obesity is now acknowledged as a chronic disease with a number of related complications, and its prevalence has reached alarming epidemic proportions. While bariatric surgery is effective at treating the disease, access to this procedure is still too limited in Canada.

3 Jun 2009

Baucus: Obama open to taxing health benefits to pay for health reform

On the same day President Obama expressed the urgent need for health care reform, he also met with two dozen Senate Democrats and suggested that he is open to considering taxing employer-provided health benefits to pay for health care reform, The Washington Post reports.

3 Jun 2009

Rising health spending spurs reform debate

A new study shows that - in the words of Jon Gabel, its lead author - "American families with employer-based [health] coverage were worse off in 2007 than they were in 2004," the Wall Street Journal reports.

3 Jun 2009

Low Medicare reimbursement rates hurt hospitals in Iowa and California

Low Medicare reimbursement rates are not keeping up with costs at hospitals in Iowa and California while a grant helps boost Medicare enrollment in Missouri.

3 Jun 2009

FDA moves towards greater openness

The Associated Press reports that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg "announced Tuesday she has created a task force to make recommendations on how the agency can release more information in such areas as drug evaluation and enforcement matters. She wants a report in six months."

3 Jun 2009

Sen. Baucus tells single-payer advocates he regrets there wasn't more discussion of single-payer plan

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., told single-payer advocates Wednesday that he regrets not allowing more discussion of the single-payer plan in his efforts to draft a health system overhaul proposal, according to participants at the meeting.

3 Jun 2009