Sugar: The toxicity question and what to do about it
Obama administration eases pain of Medicare cuts
Millions of seniors in popular private insurance plans offered through Medicare will be getting a reprieve from some of the most controversial cuts in President Barack Obama's health care law.
In a policy shift critics see as political, the Health and Human Services department has decided to award quality bonuses to hundreds of Medicare Advantage plans rated merely average.
The $6.7 billion infusion could head off service cuts that would have been a headache for Obama and Democrats in next year's elections for the White House and Congress. More than half the roughly 11 million Medicare Advantage enrollees are in plans rated average.
The insurance industry says the bonuses will turn what would have averaged out as a net loss for the plans in 2012 into a slight increase.
In a recent letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, two prominent GOP lawmakers questioned what they termed the administration's "newfound support" for Medicare Advantage.
The shift "may represent a thinly veiled use of taxpayer dollars for political purposes," wrote Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan. Camp chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees Medicare. Hatch is his counterpart as ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.
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Making a better artificial intestine
New study adds to concerns about animal-to-human resistance to antibiotics
70% of Tea Partiers Don't Want to Cut Medicare Either
Obama Panel to Curb Medicare Finds Foes in Both Parties
Patients Are Not Consumers
About that advisory board: We have to do something about health care costs, which means that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular, given continuing medical innovation, we can’t maintain a system in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends. And that’s especially true when that blank-check approach is combined with a system that gives doctors and hospitals — who aren’t saints — a strong financial incentive to engage in excessive care.Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say
Hence the advisory board, whose creation was mandated by last year’s health reform. The board, composed of health-care experts, would be given a target rate of growth in Medicare spending. To keep spending at or below this target, the board would submit “fast-track” recommendations for cost control that would go into effect automatically unless overruled by Congress.
Before you start yelling about “rationing” and “death panels,” bear in mind that we’re not talking about limits on what health care you’re allowed to buy with your own (or your insurance company’s) money. We’re talking only about what will be paid for with taxpayers’ money. And the last time I looked at it, the Declaration of Independence didn’t declare that we had the right to life, liberty, and the all-expenses-paid pursuit of happiness.
And the point is that choices must be made; one way or another, government spending on health care must be limited.
The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body — the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes.A cadaver gets under her skin
(For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.
Making a better artificial intestine
New study adds to concerns about animal-to-human resistance to antibiotics
Can antibiotic-resistant bacteria jump from animals to humans and cause disease?
Yes. The first documented instance of antibiotic-resistant staph transmission from animals to humans was in the Netherlands in 2003: A child had a MRSA infection and the only risk factor was that she lived on a pig farm. The bacterial strain she contracted matched that of the pigs, and her family also were found to be carriers, although they weren't sick.
"Now this strain makes up 30% of community-acquired disease in the Netherlands," Price says. "It's really emerging quickly."
In the U.S., a 2009 study published in the journal PLoS ONE found MRSA in 49% of 299 pigs tested at two different pig farms, as well as in nine of 20 tested farmworkers there. "We think pigs are reservoirs and transmit to humans," says study lead author Tara Smith, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "But we don't know that for sure."
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