The Miami-Dade County Commission is to start negotiating with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, which may be willing to offer lower premiums or better coverage to residents than they have previously sold in exchange for the county's seal of approval.
Citing the health benefits of doing so, virtually all Nashville-area hospitals plan to ban smoking outdoors on their property in 2008. Hundreds of hospitals nationwide have enacted total smoking bans, starting with the Mayo Clinic in 2002.
The American College of Physicians has officially announced its endorsement of a single-payer healthcare system. the organization, however, stopped short of saying that a single-payer system like Medicare, in which the government would get and pay most bills, is the best way to achieve universal coverage.
Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said he would focus on making insurance more affordable rather than requiring universal coverage as some Democrats have proposed.
If they want to avoid a pay cut from Medicare next year, the nation's medical doctors should have to adopt electronic record-keeping, the Bush administration has announced.
In an effort to motivate workers to kick unhealthy habits, employees at some companies who are overweight, smoke, or have high cholesterol, and who don't participate in supplementary wellness programs, will pay more for health insurance.
More than 40 million people in the United States say they cannot afford adequate heathcare and go without drugs, eyeglasses or dental treatment, according to the annual report on the nation's health by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sabatino Bianco, MD, director of the Trinity Mother Frances Neuroscience Institute in Tyler, TX, recently began performing an innovative procedure, the endoscopic transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, or ETH. The latest example of minimally invasive surgery, the procedure allows the removal of pituitary tumors through the nasal cavity. In this podcast, Bianco discusses ETH and the technology involved.
In our November issue you will find a profile I prepared on Donald Hopkins, MD. Hopkins' work overseas eradicating the guinea worm disease takes place in impoverished areas where the technology we take for granted doesn't exist. The tools at his disposal are primitive ones, including screens used to filter water. That's one of the first steps toward eliminating the horrific disease.
Hopkins himself seems a bit uncomfortable in the modern age of technology. He has e-mail, but relies on an assistant to answer it for him. And he has little use for cell phones. Spam is part of the problem. Hopkins keeps a fax machine in his office and commented to me how many "junk faxes" he gets. It is a truism of information technology that it opens the floodgates to unwanted information. But there's more to it than that, he pointed out.
I asked Hopkins what it was like to have worked in such adverse conditions, then return to the United States, where affluence is widespread. He's clearly disturbed by the contrast, and commented about the tremendous amount of waste here. People routinely discard "old" clothes that might be the beginning of a brand new wardrobe in the third world. And we are served huge portions in restaurants when halfway around the globe, youngsters scrape by meal to meal.
Hopkins criticized our media for its celebrity "obsession," and for turning a deaf ear on international health issues that could be tackled if more resources were poured into the effort. Although he didn't say it, he was describing a society wallowing in its own fortunes, oblivious to those less fortunate around us.
No wonder Hopkins looks askance at modern information technology. It's not the technology so much as it is the information. "What makes the nightly news are stories that are photogenic, rather than things that are important for people to understand," he told me.
That underscores the mission of magazines like HealthLeaders. No matter how far off my technology beat I may wander, I will never have to write about Paris Hilton.
Supporters of a bill that would require hospitals to dispense emergency contraception for sexual assault victims said they have enough votes to adopt the bill in the Assembly this month. But they are still facing a challenge from those who oppose the measure and say hospitals shouldn't be forced into such a mandate.
