Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius talks about the new Health Care Reform legislation, Tuesday, April 6, 2010, at the National Press Club in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
WASHINGTON — Beware of scam artists taking advantage of the new health insurance law to peddle phony policies, President Barack Obama's top health official warned consumers Tuesday.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued the fraud alert as she also announced new benefits for seniors and low-income people.
If the yearlong congressional saga that produced the sweeping insurance remake was murky and confusing, Sebelius vowed that her process for putting the law into effect will be the opposite — understandable to a typical consumer. "As soon as we know something, we're going to tell you," she promised Tuesday.
The legitimate health insurance companies will soon make changes in the way they do business, but anyone claiming some early compliance is probably scamming you. One way we can lower the cost of insurance is to crack down on all types of medical fraud.
Almost 30 million doses of swine flu vaccine ordered by the Government could go unused, at an estimated cost of up to £150 million to the taxpayer.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, confirmed yesterday that he had cancelled contracts with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for up to 90 million doses of swine flu vaccine after cases of the illness plummeted. About 5.5 million people, including health workers, have received a vaccine against the H1N1 swine flu virus, but the NHS will still face a bill for more than 34.8 million doses that have been delivered or promised.
We had the same problem in the USA, ordered twice as much as needed, too bad it can’t be frozen for long-term storage, but still better to have too much than too little, next year we’ll know.
Births to U.S. teenagers dropped two percent in 2008, reversing two years of teen birth increases that had interrupted a 14-year decline, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The biggest drop (4 percent) occurred among older teens, ages 18 to 19, who had led the earlier increases. The birth rate for teens 15 to 17 dropped by two percent while the rate for girls 10 to 14 stayed the same.
The statistics in the report – Births: Preliminary Data for 2008 – are preliminary and are based on 99.9 percent of all births registered in 2008.
Overall, the data show, the total number of births in the United States dropped almost 2 percent in 2008, from 4,317,119 in 2007 to 4,251,095. The only age groups that showed an increase in birthrates were women 40 to 44 and 45 to 54.
I just saw a TV program about how tough it is to be a teen mother, maybe the message is catching on that this is a hard life for any mother, particularly a teen mother still in high school.
A pharmacy employee dumps pills into a pill counting machine as she fills a prescription while working at a pharmacy in New York December 23, 2009.
Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - More and more Americans are landing in the hospital due to poisoning by powerful prescription painkillers, sedatives and tranquilizers, according to a report released today. City-living middle-aged women seem particularly vulnerable.
"People have seen the headlines related to Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith and they think that's tragic but maybe contained to Hollywood," Dr. Jeffrey H. Coben of West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown told Reuters Health.
"But the fact of the matter is we are seeing, across the country, very significant increases in serious overdoses associated with these prescription drugs," Coben warned.
Between 1999 and 2006, US hospital admissions due to poisoning by prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers rose from approximately 43,000 to about 71,000.
Maybe there are many kinds of “hillbilly heroin” pills out there being abused every day, I still think most Americans put up with the pain rather than beg their doctor for pain pills—it’s too much trouble.
The Oregonian
The rate of high-risk surgical operations for back pain increased 15-fold in five years, and researchers studying the trend say that it may be harming more than helping some patients.
The study focused on women and men age 65 and older diagnosed with lumbar stenosis, a common back problem in which aging spinal vertebra pinch the spinal nerves. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and three other institutions compared national Medicare data on surgeries to treat lumbar stenosis from 2002 to 2007.
When you have back pain, you’ll try anything anybody says will help the pain, but yes, surgery on the back may take years to fully heal and sometimes the pain is even worse. Those are the risks.
The vaccine is currently the most clinically advanced in the world
More than one thousand 500 Ghanaians, mainly from Kintampo, are participating in the third phase of a trial to determine the efficacy of the first vaccine for malaria. About 16,000 children in two age groups - six to 10 weeks and five to 17 months are being selected from seven African countries, for the three-year trial.
The vaccine is currently the most clinically advanced in the world.
In an interview in Washington DC, Dr. Ashley Birkett of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative said results of studies have shown that the vaccine is safe and could reduce the risk of clinical episodes of malaria.
I hope this works well and we can wipe out malaria with this vaccine, this has been a major disease in the world today, and a working vaccine would be a major boon to humanity.
Posted
Apr 07 2010, 03:51 AM
by
Robert Gleeman