Healthcare update

Urethras can now be made in the lab -- and they work

Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

County-Level "Diabetes Belt" Carves a Swath through U.S. South

More than 18 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with diabetes, which costs an estimated $174 billion annually. Typically, local public health agencies carry out the initiatives to manage and prevent this chronic disease, but because prevalence figures are generally given on national and state levels, local workers cannot gain the traction—and funding—to rein in rates in their areas. 

A new study drills down to the county level, revealing wide disparities within states and striking national patterns. "We're extremely excited about the county level," says Lawrence Barker, associate director for science at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Diabetes Translation. 

Many of the counties with the highest rates of diagnosed diabetes—higher than 11.2 percent of the population compared with the national average of 8.5 percent—are concentrated in 15 states and form an area the study's authors have labeled the "diabetes belt" (after the so-called "stroke belt" that described U.S. Southeast in the 1960s).

Put-up-or-shut-up time on health-care reform

Cutting Medicare is hard

Paul Krugman on why cutting Medicare spending is more complicated than cutting Social Security spending:

You can propose simply cutting retirement benefits by 25 percent, and that’s doable. But you can’t decide to do only three-quarters of every operation and test that Medicare pays for (and no, you can’t demand that patients pay 1/4 of the cost without effectively denying care to many Americans). So Medicare cuts are an inherently harder problem than SS cuts.