New Jersey will be receiving nearly $17 million in federal stimulus money to upgrade and expand community health centers across the state.
The grants will go toward pressing health center facility and equipment needs, and toward generally increasing access to healthcare. First Lady Michelle Obama made the announcement.
A bill to open Pennsylvania's government-subsidized health-insurance program to 85,000 more lower-income adults has won House approval. But while passage had been a priority of House Democrats who symbolically numbered it House Bill 1, only a single Republican representative crossed party lines in the 104-96 vote. It was sent to the Republican-majority state Senate, where a GOP spokesman said there were no plans to take it up.
Karen Ignagni is the chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, the main health insurance lobby, at a time when a the president is planning a sweeping healthcare overhaul. Insurance executives believe this is a critical moment: If Congress creates the strong government insurance option that liberals want, insurers say they would be unable to compete and would eventually go out of business.
On the other hand, if lawmakers pass a healthcare bill that has no public insurance alternative but that does require everyone to obtain insurance, the industry could pick up millions of new subscribers.
The widespread use of expensive cancer drugs to prolong patients’ lives by just weeks or months was called into question by an article published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. But while some policy experts consider the rationing of healthcare resources inevitable in the quest to control medical spending, many Americans have long resisted putting the collective fiscal good over their individual health.
Four very different patients underwent a CT scan at North Shore University Hospital this week. They each hail from the Middle East, are well-to-do, and, oh, died thousands of years ago.
Four ancient Egyptian mummies, dating as far back as 1188 BC, journeyed from their display at the Brooklyn Museum to the Manhasset, NY, hospital so that the museum's Egyptologists could learn more about their lives—and deaths. North Shore's 64-slice CT scan, though normally used to detect heart abnormalities, provided the scientists with detailed images of the mummies' tissues and skeletal systems without performing any potentially damaging invasive procedures.
"The Brooklyn Museum had a history of using medical technology to look at Egyptian antiquities to evaluate them and try to explore them without actually causing damage to them and going through them and opening them," says Dr. Amgad Makaryus, North Shore's director of cardiac CT and MRI. "The reason they contacted us is they knew we had this new 64-detector scanner technology that gives you high resolution images that would be helpful in exploring these mummies."
After reviewing the images, the Egyptologists made some startling discoveries. The remains of the Count of Thebes were found to have a reed-like tube in the chest area, which the scientists believe could have been placed there to keep the Count's head in a regal position for eternity. When the remains of Lady Hor were scanned, the scientists found something even more shocking—the Lady was a man.
"The museum people were a little bit amazed about that," Makaryus says. "The best part is we got all this information noninvasively. I think that's really one of the main points here—modern science meeting very old mummies and exploring them without actually having to cut them open."
But not only did these CT scans provide benefits for the museum's scientists, they also created a positive public relations opportunity for the hospital. The press coverage surrounding the mummies' medical procedure incidentally informed the public about the hospital's advanced technology, says Michelle Pinto, North Shore's director of media relations.
"Aside from the fact that we're very proud that we can offer our cardiac patients the 64 slice CAT scan, what we were proud about is that by bringing the mummies here we were able to treat them with the respect that ancient objects of art deserve," she says. "It was a great new way to use the great technology and it was a blending of art and science."
Makaryus says some curious acquaintances have even contacted him personally.
"I've had people call up and say we saw about the mummies and most people are very interested," he says. "We're using this new technology to scan very old mummies and actually learn something about them. There's definitely general interest about it."
Though the Brooklyn Museum has no immediate plans to scan any additional mummies, they may use these four mummies' CT scan images in an upcoming exhibit, Makaryus says.
"The old meeting the new, in terms of this modern day technology that we use on living human beings to actually assess mummies, really ties the whole juxtaposition of ancient mummies and modern day technology," he says.
David Axelrod, President Obama's top political adviser, declined to rule out the possibility that the White House would agree to a tax hike on health insurance plans that would hit middle-income Americans. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Axelrod declined to repeat Obama's pledge during his campaign that families making under $250,000 would not see "any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." Instead, Axelrod said the president has no interest in "drawing lines in the sand" on the issue of how to pay for the costly health reform plan making its way through Congress.