Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

The Ingenix mess apparently won’t go away. Sen. Jay Rockefeller is now going after the health plans for using Ingenix’ database. Ingenix and some of its customer health plans have already settled with several states, but apparently it’s not enough. NowRockefeller is after them. And the words are tough. “Fraud”, for one.

Now, health plans don’t exactly have much credibility. And when the politicos find out that Ingenix a) sells tools to help health plans cram down the amount they pay providers, b) sells tools to providers to extract more money from health plans, and c) is owned by the biggest (and not too long ago) baddest insurer on the block, this may get a little more interesting. After all, it’s kind of an arms dealer arming both sides.

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March 31, 2009 marks the beginning date for Congressional hearings for legislation designed to protect consumers. Legal Times recent edition summarizes battles facing patient advocates, including the attorneys at Regan Zambri & Long, who fight for patients and their families who have been injured or lost their lives as a result of unsafe medical devices, medication and other consumer protection issues. Senior Regan Zambri & Long Partner, Patrick Regan was interviewed and quoted in this recent article.

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By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs .

Scientists at the university of Sydney in Australia have recently claimed to be able to make people’s memory more accurate by reducing the occurrence of false memories… via magnets.

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On April 22–23 in Boston, two ideas are going to come together. Health 2.0 has been defined in different ways, but is most often considered to be the use of lightweight online technologies which allow consumers to access and exchange health information via the now familiar search, communities and tools. Information therapy (Ix or information prescriptions) involves the proactive delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time, usually as part of the care delivery process.

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During the past several years, researchers have discovered that Avandia, used to treat Type 2 diabetes, increases patient risks for a variety of problems, including, but not limited to:

43% increase for heart attack risk 64% increased risk of death from heart disease double risk for bone fractures increased risk of anemia increased risk of vision loss from macular edema

Recent research conclusions published in the America Diabetes Association's (ADA) Diabetes Care advises against use of Avandia because of an increase in life-threatening liver toxicity.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, results from RealAge online tests are not as private as participants may believe.

As a nation, we are in a heap of trouble. Our medical system is a disaster—overly expensive and ineffective. On average, we spend two to three times more per capita on health care than other developed countries. Yet on measures of quality, we rank 22nd out of 23 among those same countries, according to the World Health Organization. Not only that, Medicare, our national insurer for the elderly and disabled, is facing more than $30 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 40 years. We have 50 million people who are uninsured in this country and millions more who are underinsured because employers have shifted a larger percentage of premium costs to them and increased deductibles and coinsurance payments, causing some to forgomedical treatment because of the expense.

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Interesting new article in the latest Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. The article is entitledHow Political Epidemiology Research can Address why the Millennium Development Goals have not been Achieved: Developing a Research Agenda. The abstract is less interesting than the following excerpt:

Public policies, and their relation to health, are still not part of mainstream epidemiology, which continues to consider health as apolitical, and applies a definition of health that is centred on the individual illness rather than on society health problems. As a result, health policies are equated to healthcare services policies, and inequalities in health distribution are considered to be the result of individual problems (chosen lifestyle) or of how healthcare is implemented. This perspective has the effect of directing political attention towards the most manageable variable, the healthcare services. However, health inequalities have a political basis.10 Information on health inequality is not sufficient in order to decide what is inevitable and what is unjust, and such a decision does not depend solely on logic and empirical research, but also on an assessment of politics and ideology.

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For the past six years, Harvard Pilgrim has offered a limited network product to our New Hampshiremembers called “NewHampshire NetOption.” Simply put, all New Hampshire providers are Tier One providers - lowest co-pays - and so are all Massachusetts community hospitals. Tier Two providers are MA-based teaching hospitals (members have a higher co-pay for services there). That’s it. Two tiers - one for NH hospitals and MA community hospitals, and a different one for MA-based teaching hospitals.

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Next month the Supreme Court will be given the chance to redress one minorthe lunacy of the last thirty years of the so-called “war on drugs”. It will get to decide whether in the name of "zero tolerance" a thirteen year old girlcan be strip searched in the quest to find some OTC ibuprofen. Oh, and she was an honor student falsely accused by a former "friend". Given the current make-up of the Supreme Court—yes Clarence Thomas still gets a vote—we can probably expect nothing sensible.

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