November has become more than the month devoted to families and feasting: It’s now the start of the season when Americans try like heck to avoid becoming health insurance turkeys. Open enrollment periods are under way — for those who get their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and for millions covered….
Continue ReadingArchives for November 2015
Differences shrink between black, white Americans in life expectancy
The gap between black and white Americans in life expectancy is shrinking, for good reasons and bad ones. Good: Heart and blood vessel disease is not killing African Americans quite as lethally as before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. There is also good news of improvements in black Americans’ deaths due to cancer, HIV,….
Continue ReadingWhen will we wise up about fast food, wellness, and food risks?
If Americans hadn’t already gotten a clue from books like Fast Food Nation and films like Super Size Me about just how harmful fast-food eating can be to health, they can look now to the latest outbreak of food-borne illness to raise further red flags, this time an E. coli outbreak tied to Chipoltle fast-food outlets: 40….
Continue ReadingA cause for growing concern: feverish health care news on business pages
Ask Americans what’s their No. 1 health priority and an unsurprising answer pops up: Across the political spectrum, the Chicago Tribune reports, Americans are expressing growing concern about keeping the affordability of prescription drugs for serious conditions. The increasing unease certainly reflects that in recent days some of the biggest–and most troubling — reports in….
Continue ReadingProsecutors win rare murder conviction of M.D. in prescription drug deaths
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers but one voice among many that has declared that the United States is in the midst of a prescription drug abuse epidemic. As the CDC notes: “Since 1999, the amount of prescription painkillers prescribed and sold in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled, yet there has not been….
Continue ReadingA Life Expectancy Trend Moving in the Wrong Direction
Suicide and its slower version (death from alcohol and drug abuse) appear to be the drivers behind a rising tide of deaths and worsening life expectancy in a specific and startling niche: middle-aged white Americans who lack college educations. Other demographic groups, in the U.S. and other rich countries, are doing nicely in life expectancy,….
Continue ReadingAre electronic medical health records an epic fail or a maturing technology?
For patients, few aspects of their interactions with their care-givers can be more frustrating than the repetition of medical histories, medications, tests taken, and procedures undergone. This process also can be time-consuming and costly, especially when physicians, in an abundance of caution, re-order tests or procedures because they can’t be sure if they were done….
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