Senator Wants to Lower Health Costs by Taxing Benefits
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.,wants to control health care costs by taxing some benefits provided by employers. President Barack Obama has previously ruled this out.
"I know that's an issue we have to work out with the president, but I think it's an issue we will work out," said Baucus, who is among several Senate Democrats scheduled to meet with Obama Tuesday afternoon.
Baucus says the tax-free benefit packages Americans now enjoy are a big factor in the high costs of the country's health care system, because they provide workers free or low-cost access to too many health care services.
The senator's recommendation came at a White House event where Obama advisers released a new economic report that links fixing the economy with overhauling the costly U.S. health care system.
Obama is pushing Congress to enact sweeping health legislation this year to hold down costs and provide health coverage for 50 million uninsured Americans.
Perhaps Baucus will find some support for his plan from the general public if he includes taxing the benefits Congress enjoys at the public's expense.
Red Meat Will Kill You
Now there is proof that
red meat is the scourge of health that vegetarians have been calling it for years:
CHICAGO – The largest study of its kind finds that older Americans who eat large amounts of red meat and processed meats face a greater risk of death from heart disease and cancer. The federal study of more than half a million men and women bolsters prior evidence of the health risks of diets laden with red meat like hamburger and processed meats like hot dogs, bacon and cold cuts.
Calling the increased risk modest, lead author Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute said the findings support the advice of several health groups to limit red and processed meat intake to decrease cancer risk.
The findings appear in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.
Pain 'national health-care crisis'
From
McClatchy Newspapers:
WASHINGTON — Medical science has learned a great deal about the causes of pain and ways to relieve it, pain experts say, but for a host of reasons, the treatment of pain and suffering has improved hardly at all in recent years.
John Seffrin, the president of the American Cancer Society, calls this "a national health-care crisis of under-treated pain.''
"Nearly all cancer pain can be relieved, but fewer than half of our patients report adequate pain relief,'' Rebecca Kirch, the society's associate director of policy, told a pain seminar in Washington last week.
Hospitals do a little better than that in managing pain for patients with all kinds of illnesses, according to a survey to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The survey of hospitals in 40 metropolitan areas by the Harvard School of Public Health found that one-third of patients felt that their pain wasn't well controlled. The percentage of those who were satisfied by their pain care ranged from 72 percent in Birmingham, Ala., to 57 percent in New York City hospitals.
Evil Research
From
Scientific American:
TROY, N.Y.—The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil—or rather trying to get to the roots of evil—that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science here. He's so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.
"I've been working on what is evil and how to formally define it," says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). "It's creepy, I know it is."
To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.
Testing for the cancer gene
Should kids be tested for the cancer gene?
Experts say no!About 100,000 tests for breast cancer gene mutations were done last year, double the number in 2005. The trend may grow even more because of widening insurance coverage and a new law banning genetic discrimination.
Medical experts advise against such testing before age 25, saying that little can be done to prevent or screen for breast or ovarian cancer until then, so the knowledge would only cause needless worry.
However, new studies and interviews by The Associated Press show that many people who have BRCA gene mutations — and even more of their offspring — disagree. Cornell University freshman Jenna Stoller is one.
"I'm the kind of person that, like my mom, am more comfortable knowing something about myself than not knowing," said Stoller, who tested positive earlier this year, shortly after her 18th birthday. Her mother made her wait five years after revealing her own positive test result, even though Jenna wanted to be tested at age 13.
Warnings issued on rheumatoid arthritis drugs
From the
Cleveland Plain Dealer via Associated Press:
Washington - The Food and Drug Administration ordered stronger warnings Thursday on four medications widely used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other serious illnesses, saying they can raise the risk of possibly fatal fungal infections.
The drugs - Enbrel, Remicade, Humira and Cimzia - work by suppressing the immune system to keep it from attacking the body. For patients with rheumatoid arthritis, the treatment provides relief from swollen and painful joints, but it's "a double-edged sword," said the FDA's Dr. Jeffrey Siegel. That's because the drugs also lower the body's defenses to various kinds of infections.
Lack of protection from sunscreens
From LiveScience.com:
The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington-based research group and habitual gadfly to the business world, has found that 4 out of 5 of the nearly 1,000 sunscreen lotions analyzed offer inadequate protection from the sun or contain harmful chemicals. The biggest offenders, the EWG said, are the industry leaders: Coppertone, Banana Boat and Neutrogena.
While 3 out of 3 industry leaders are rather upset with the EWG report, and while some dermatologists criticize it for hyperbole, the report does underscore several long-standing health concerns:
Sunscreens do not offer blanket protection from the sun and do little to prevent the most deadly form of skin cancer; reliance on them instead of, say, a hat and protective clothing, might be contributing to skin cancer; and the Food and Drug Administration has yet to issue any safety standards, mysteriously sitting on a set of recommendations drafted 30 years ago.
