Health stories in the news

New Yorker article required reading at White House

Robert Pear reports in today’s New York Times that an article in the New Yorker magazine has dramatically affected President Barack Obama’s thinking about health care reform.

Pear writes:

“President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.

“He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’ “

The New Yorker article by Atul Gawande describes how the cost of health care varies wildly across the U.S. — with lower cost areas often providing quality as good as if not better than the most expensive.

In the article, Gawande profiles the border town of McAllen, Texas in a county where the household incomes is one of the lowest in the U.S. but which is also one of the most expensive health-care markets in the United States.

“Only Miami-which has much higher labor and living costs-spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.”

To learn more:

• Read Robert Pear’s article: Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight.
• Read Atul Gawande’s article: The Cost Conundrum.

More details on changes to Washington’s Basic Health plan

Seattle Times health reporter Kyung Song has a piece in today’s paper on how Washington’s Basic Health Plan plans to cope with its 43 percent budget cut. She writes:

Officials with Washington’s Basic Health Plan are resorting to steep premium increases to achieve what they were loath to do on their own — expel thousands of working-class people from the cash-strapped state insurance program.

To learn more:

• Read: State decides to let higher health-care premiums do dirty work.
• Read LocalHealthGuide’s coverage from yesterday.
• Visit the Health Care Authority’s Web page, where you can find additional information about the Basic Health plan and the new rate hikes.

Pediatricians to tackle school bullies

New York Times columnist Dr. Perri Klass writes that the American Academy of Pediatrics will address bullying in their upcoming policy statement of preventing youth violence.

“Next month, the American Academy of Pediatrics will publish the new version of an official policy statement on the pediatrician’s role in preventing youth violence. For the first time, it will have a section on bullying – including a recommendation that schools adopt a prevention model developed by Dan Olweus, a research professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway, who first began studying the phenomenon of school bullying in Scandinavia in the 1970s. The programs, he said, ‘work at the school level and the classroom level and at the individual level; they combine preventive programs and directly addressing children who are involved or identified as bullies or victims or both.’”

Klass feels that pediatricians haven’t given the issue of bullying the attention it deserves.

“The way we understand bullying has changed, and it’s probably going to change even more. (I haven’t even talked about cyberbullying, for example.) But anyone working with children needs to start from the idea that bullying has long-term consequences and that it is preventable.”

To learn more:

• Read Perri Klass’s article: At Last, Facing Down Bullies (and Their Enablers).

Tags: Bullying, Health Insurance, Health-care Reform, Healthcare Policy, Insurance, Washington Basic Health Plan

Category: Child & Youth Health, Health-care Policy, Psychology & Psychiatry