Some of the largest U.S. business groups announced a multimillion-dollar television advertising campaign aimed at defeating the Democrats' pending healthcare legislation, the Wall Street Journal reports. The business coalition, Employers for a Healthy Economy, said it would run between $4 million and $10 million of ads targeting the districts of several dozen Democratic lawmakers, carrying the message that the bill would cause job losses. The ads are being funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations that represent a broad swath of industry, the Journal reports.
The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders said that they were bracing for a key procedural ruling that could complicate their effort to approve major healthcare legislation by requiring President Obama to sign the bill into law before Congress could revise it through an expedited budget process, the New York Times reports. An official determination on the matter could come within days from the House and Senate parliamentarians, and could present yet another hurdle for Obama and Democratic leaders as they try to lock in support from lawmakers in the House.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell has announced a new $352 million plan for the University of Connecticut Health Center. UConn's John Dempsey Hospital would get a new $236 million patient tower, and the UConn Health Center would get $96 million in renovated academic and research space. Two of Dempsey's competitors, Hartford Hospital and St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, would also get funding to develop programs that would collaborate with the health center, the Hartford Courant reports.
A new kind of medical document allows patients to tell their family and doctors exactly what kind of care they want at the end of life. The directive is slowly being adopted at hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices as part of a groundswell within the medical community to give terminally ill patients more control over how and where they die, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Experts say the document—Provider Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment, or POLST—and the careful decisionmaking that precedes it lift a terrible emotional burden from patients' families, reports the Tribune.
Just months after saying it was phasing out an artificial hip implant because of slowing sales, a unit of Johnson & Johnson has warned doctors that the device appears to have a high early failure rate in some patients. The action by the company follows more than two years of reports that the hip implant, which is known as the ASR, was failing in patients only a few years after implant and requiring costly, painful replacement operations, the New York Times reports.
President Obama challenged wavering members of his party not to give in to political fears about supporting healthcare legislation, asserting that the urgency of getting a bill through Congress should trump any concern about the consequences for Democrats in November's elections, the New York Times reports. Citing big rate increases for buyers of individual insurance policies in some states, President Obama sought to focus attention on provisions in the health reform legislation that he said would protect consumers from the worst excesses of insurers, give people more choice among insurance policies, insure most people who do not have coverage, and put downward pressure on healthcare costs.