CommonHealth

Medicaid On The Ballot (The New York Times) — “There’s a lot we don’t know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic “plan” is an empty shell.But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid.”

State Wants Pharmacist To Resign As Regulator (The Boston Globe) — “The lead pharmacist of a sister company to the pharmacy at the center of the meningitis outbreak has been asked to resign from the state board that oversees pharmacies.”

Would You Accept Obesity Advice From A Fat Doctor? (Kevin MD) — “Something that has been on my mind recently is obesity, specifically obesity in doctors. This may be because we cover obesity in a high percentage of our stories (1 in 3 Americans is obese, after all) or because I recently discovered that I gained ten pounds since moving to New York City. Either way, after watching Dr. Snyderman speak her mind on national television about how obese leaders are unfit to lead, I have been thinking: are patients less likely to trust doctors who are obese? It is a valid concern because you expect people in other careers to match what they’re selling – dentists have good teeth, dermatologists have nice skin, personal shoppers should be stylish, and so on. With that reasoning, shouldn’t doctors be the perfect picture of health in areas of medicine that they can control? I’m not talking about doctors being sick with a cold or having asthma; I’m referring to doctors who make lifestyle choices that are clearly not healthy – being obese, smoking cigarettes, doing drugs, dinking alcohol, engaging in unprotected sex, etc. The easiest one of these to spot is obesity. Would you really listen to someone tell you to lose weight if he or she can’t seem to do the same for health reasons? A study published in the journal Obesity from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Jan 2012 shows that obese doctors are less likely to talk to their patients about weight loss — 18% of obese doctors talked to their patients about weight whereas 32% of normal weight doctors covered the same topic.”

Pricey New Prostate Cancer Therapy Raises Questions About Safety, Cost (NPR) — “But proton therapy has become the center of an intense debate. Critics say it’s an example of a big problem with the U.S. health system: Doctors start using expensive new treatments before anyone knows whether they work, whether they’re safe, and whether they’re worth the extra money. “There’s a concerning trend of us building new and expensive new technology and using it for a common cancer like prostate without proving, really, that it’s equivalent to the existing technology,” said Ronald Chen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “New treatments can — even though they’re promising — can potentially not be better and can even be worse,” Chen said. “I think we have to do careful studies before we adopt new treatments.” The ProCure clinic is the newest of 10 proton centers around the country, and there are perhaps 10 more on the way. That has many experts worried.”