President Trump has made it official: He intends to nominate Nancy B. Beck, a chemical industry insider and a scientist who built a record at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of scaling back safeguards against toxic substances, to lead one of the nation’s top and lately troubled consumer safety watchdogs. The ascent of Beck to….
Continue ReadingArchives for March 2020
High court, for third time, takes up a GOP effort to kill popular Obamacare
Timing may be everything in life and the law: The U.S. Supreme Court — while giving the Trump Administration a small political break for now — may give the president’s fall reelection campaign plenty of upset still. Whether the court will give the country a health care disaster is another question. The high court, acting….
Continue ReadingAll U.S. adults are urged to get hepatitis C test, as opioid crisis-infections spike
The opioid-overdose crisis has not disappeared, not by a long shot, and there’s a new warning about its toll: A blue-ribbon expert panel has urged doctors to expand testing for hepatitis C to all adults, ages 18 to 79, and no longer limiting the screening to those born between 1945 and 1965. That’s because the….
Continue ReadingAs virus spreads, concerns surge about testing, hospitals, and nursing homes
The coronavirus outbreak spreading across the globe may be providing Americans with an unhappy view of the dirty downsides of the too-often dysfunctional U.S. health care system as it grapples with spiking Covid-19 infections. Congress has appropriated more than $8 billion, so the federal government can provide the nation the support it needs in battling….
Continue ReadingRoutine cognitive tests for seniors? Not for now, blue-ribbon panel advises
It sounds like a good idea. Have primary care doctors learn about older patients’ cognitive health by putting all of them, during routine office check-ups, through a few minutes of tests in which they are asked to recall lists of words, draw a clock face, describe the day and date of their appointment, talk about….
Continue ReadingAt the VA, concerns increasing about top leadership and outside meddling
One of the nation’s largest health systems faces yet more serious questions about its leadership and external meddling in the quality and safety of its care. So, once again taxpayers may be asking themselves, with anger, What the heck is going on now at the top of the Department of Veterans Affairs? Internal watchdogs have….
Continue ReadingDrug maker to pay $1.6 billion to settle claims over its big role in opioids crisis
The civil justice system has scored a win in curtailing what once was a major maker of much abused and lethal prescription painkillers: Mallinckrodt, a global drug making giant, has agreed to send its opioids-making generics division into bankruptcy as part of a $1.6 billion settlement to settle thousands of opioid damage claims by state….
Continue ReadingCovid-19 shifts from health menace to a political and economic nightmare, too.
The viral outbreak that exploded out of central China suddenly has captured the rapt attention of Wall Street, the White House, and Americans from coast to coast. The rising pitch and politicization of the important conversation about Covid-19 — a respiratory virus that already has posed a growing global health threat — can only be….
Continue Reading