With pressure mounting from the White House to cut back on soaring healthcare costs, an aide to Florida Sen. Bill Nelson said that the senator is seriously concerned such reductions could damage patient care in places such as Miami, where costs are among the highest in the nation. In addition, at a Miami press conference several political and healthcare leaders said reducing costs was crucial if the Obama administration was going to advance its plans for reform. "It has to be done everywhere," said Miami Mayor Manny Diaz.
The Medical College of Georgia will learn this month whether it received permission from a national accrediting agency to open a campus in Athens to help meet the state's demand for more physicians. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education will decide whether the Medical College's School of Medicine can expand its entering class by 40 students starting in August 2010. Georgia ranks 39th in the nation in the number of doctors per resident, according to the Georgia Board of Physician Workforce.
In this op-ed piece from the New York Times, three healthcare experts say that while most medical travelers seek cosmetic procedures, an increasing number have high-risk operations like heart surgery and joint replacement in places like India, Singapore, and Thailand. The only way to determine of this is a good idea is to find out how foreign hospitals and surgeons compare with their American counterparts in terms of cost and quality, the authors say.
Black women in Washington, DC, suffer from obesity, diabetes, heart disease and generally poor health in alarmingly high numbers, and white women do not, according to a study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The study said there is a large disparity in the incidence of certain chronic diseases between black and white women. Kaiser's study was based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal Current Population Survey from 2004 to 2006.
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein says that if we really want to fix America's healthcare system, what really matters is changing the ways doctors practice medicine, individually and collectively. Everything else is "just tinkering at the margin," he says.
Medical device company ev3 Inc. announced it agreed to buy technology company Chestnut Medical Technologies Inc. for up to $150 million in cash and stock. Ev3 will pay $75 million upfront for Chestnut, with 30% to 40% of that total being paid in stock. It expects the deal for the privately held company to close within 45 days.