With the average NFL salary around $2 million, players acknowledge they have much greater financial resources to weather a work stoppage than the average out-of-work fan. But as the NFL lockout enters its second week, some players are beginning to realize how expensive it will be to maintain their chiseled—and in some cases enormous—physiques to the standard they achieved when they had the run of NFL training facilities and weight rooms, breakfast and lunch spreads, trainers, therapists, physicians, and NFL-funded health-care coverage. In a significant blow for the NFLPA, an arbitrator ruled in February that the NFL did not have to provide health insurance coverage for active players once the most recent collective bargaining agreement expired in early March, even though the league had provided benefits to players during the 1982 and '87 strikes.
Brigham and Women's Hospital surgeons last week performed the first full face transplant in the United States, attaching a donor's face to a young Texas man who suffered severe burns in a horrific electrical accident in 2008, the hospital said Monday. Dallas Wiens, 25, lost all of his features -- except for a small portion of his chin -- when a cherry-picker he was working on maneuvered into a live wire. In a statement released this morning, the Brigham said that a team of more than 30 surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and residents worked for more than 15 hours to replace Wiens' facial area, "including the nose, lips, facial skin, muscles of facial animation and the nerves that power them and provide sensation." The transplant extended from the mid-scalp to his neck. Wiens' grandfather, Del Peterson, told the media, "Definitely it's a miracle. When I first saw him after the injury I had no idea what would follow. This is beyond anything I had imagined."
California health insurer Anthem Blue Cross, scaling back rate increases for the second time in less than a year, has agreed to cut nearly in half average increases for more than 500,000 individual policyholders. State officials said California's largest for-profit health insurer would reduce average July 1 increases to 9.1% from 16.4%. Anthem said it also would put on hold until January plans to hike policyholders' deductibles and co-pays for medical services at the same time. Anthem in January had postponed its insurance rate increase for 60 days while California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones examined its filings. Its new rates announced Monday would save customers an estimated $40 million in premiums this year. Last year, Anthem cut its rate increases nearly in half after a planned 39% hike set off a national uproar over the cost of health insurance.
An older kind of Lap-Band weight-loss surgery could lead to severe complications over the long haul, Belgian researchers said. The surgery works by placing a silicone band around the top portion of the stomach to restrict food intake. It has become an increasingly popular option in the battle against obesity, but some experts have worried about its safety. The Belgian team found that as many as half their patients, followed for at least 12 years, needed to have the band removed in that period. And in more than a quarter, the band had gnawed its way through the wall of the stomach. "The high failure rate of (Lap-Band surgery), at least in our hands, could be detrimental to its future continued widespread use as a restrictive weight loss operation," Jacques Himpens, MD, of the Saint Pierre University Hospital in Brussels and colleagues write in the Archives of Surgery.
Washington State's Health Technology Assessment committee has authority under state law to determine which medical devices and procedures Washington will cover for state employees, Medicaid patients and injured workers, about 750,000 people in all. While all states, private insurers and the federal Medicare program decide what to cover, this state's program is attracting nationwide attention, in part because its process is public and open. That provides a living laboratory of the complexities of applying evidence-based medicine, something that is becoming more common as a way to rein in healthcare costs. The program is also drawing attention because it explicitly considers the cost of treatments in making its decisions, akin to Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. That similarity alone has made the Washington program the target of criticism from opponents of the new federal healthcare legislation.
State governments are rushing to pay billions of dollars of medical bills before special federal assistance for Medicaid expires July 1. The hurry-up-and-pay effort will put an extra $1 billion or more into the pockets of financially struggling states ? and increase the federal deficit by a similar amount. "States are paying bills as fast as they can," says Debra Miller, healthcare expert at the Council of State Governments. "It's kind of the opposite of what states traditionally do." To beat deadlines for reduced federal aid, states are writing checks swiftly, paying off backlogs of bills and asking hospitals and doctors to send in bills as fast as they can. The federal stimulus law and a later extension provided states an extra $80 billion in 2009 and 2010 for Medicaid. This was done by reducing the states' share of the program from a national average of 40% to 28%.