About health insurance
Congress revives surprise billing debate with proposal for 'mediation': “The House Ways & Means Committee released the legislation on Friday as a bid to end an impasse over how to handle surprise billing with a proposal to use a ‘mediation’ process to handle disputes…During mediation, the parties will present the best and final offers along with any supporting information to the mediator, who will consider the median contracted rate specific to the plan, and for similar providers, services and geographic areas…”
Women Shouldn’t Get A Bill For An IUD … But Sometimes They Do: This article explains exceptions to comprehensive contraceptive benefits.
About healthcare IT
New Jerseyans turn to–and trust–MDs, nurses most for health care information: Just because people consult websites for healthcare information does not mean they trust them. “Nine in 10 New Jerseyans report being likely to ask a doctor for information; 8 in 10 say they ask a nurse; and around 9 in 10 trusts each of these sources to provide accurate health information…New Jerseyans rate traditional and social media much lower: a third seek and trust information from television, newspaper or radio, while about 1 in 5 use social media for health-related information, and 1 in 10 trusts it, according to the poll.”
FDA authorizes marketing of software that uses artificial intelligence for cardiac diagnostics: ”The AI user interface offers prescriptive guidance on how to move the ultrasound probe to obtain standard echocardiographic images and video clips of diagnostic quality. It offers real-time feedback on potential image quality, auto-captures video clips and automatically saves the best video clip obtained from a specific view…the software allowed registered nurses to obtain echocardiography images and videos of diagnostic quality.”
About the public’s health
Trump to Propose $4.8 Trillion Budget With Big Safety-Net Cuts: “The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps —and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to disability benefits.” The Democratic House is already opposing these measures.
WHO’s aggressive, three-part strategy aims to make cervical cancer a thing of the past: The strategy is called “90-70-90: vaccinating 90 percent of women against multiple strains of HPV, screening 70 percent of women for cervical cancer at ages 35 and 45, and giving care to 90 percent of women diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Taken together, those three steps could eliminate more than 74 million cases and save more than 62 million lives, researchers write.”
Now that we know what to do, we need to have the resources (including personnel) to do it and also enhance population participation in the preventive portions. What techniques of social marketing would help?
Coronavirus: The Latest Problem Big Pharma Won’t Solve: “With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, a disease for which there is neither a vaccine nor an effective drug treatment, the call for such innovations is growing louder by the day. With global sales in vaccines alone totaling $54 billion in 2019 and predicted to near $60 billion in 2020, one would think that industry has the reserves to jump at this challenge. But so far, as reported by Barron’s, none of the four top vaccine companies has shown significant interest. It has been the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a government- and charity-funded initiative to accelerate the development of vaccines to respond to outbreaks, that has been leading the effort to find a vaccine for 2019-nCoV.
The coronavirus seems poised to join a lengthy list of health problems the industry turns its back on unless additional incentives are made available: antimicrobial resistance, pediatric medicines, medicines to treat diseases of the poor, new infectious diseases such as Ebola, neglected tropical diseases, and rare diseases.”
What financial incentives do governments need to provide for companies to actively engage in addressing these problems, some of which, like antibiotic resistance and opioid dependence, they helped create?
2020’s Healthiest & Unhealthiest Cities in America: Here is WalletHub’s annual survey of the health of US cities. Read the methodology first. Top of the list? San Francisco.
1st American dies of coronavirus as death toll surpasses SARS: Update on the corona virus.
About emerging technology
‘Chemical earmuffs’ could prevent hearing loss :”…a team of biologists at the University of Iowa and Washington University… identified a receptor that, when blocked, can prevent a common type of hearing loss…The researchers identified that some receptors involved in the hair-cell-to-nerve-cell transmission lack a protein called GluA2, and it is these receptors that are responsible for synaptopathy, or hearing loss caused by irreparable damage to the synapses.
The biologists employed a drug in mice that selectively blocked the GluA2-lacking receptors, and prevented the mice from experiencing synaptopathy when exposed to noise.”