The Feds are coming for kids chocolate milk. Also, other school menu items that school kids will actually eat. Teachers, parents, school cafeteria cooks, school nutritionists and kids are in an uproar over a policy decision so dire that it might cause school kids to go hungry and thirsty.
Can’t Find a Doctor Who Takes Medicare, Medicaid or Obamacare? Blame Congress (and the AMA)!
Imagine spending most of your life preparing to be a doctor. You get straight As in high school and college. You are accepted to medical school and four years later you graduate with a Doctor of Medicine degree. Your training is not over, however. Medical school graduates must go through a residency training program, which is a requirement to practice medicine in all 50 states. Not all medical graduates will be accepted into residency. In other words, the National Resident Matching Program (Match) is a game of musical chairs, where the losers lose not only their seat but often their career.
Friday Links
- Other countries have drug approval reciprocity (where one country accepts another’s approval including our own FDA approval), so why don’t we?
- Study: Mediterranean diet reduces heart disease in women (24%) by just as much as it does in men.
- Study: Among older patients with metastatic cancer, the majority received aggressive treatment in their final 30 days. A quarter underwent cancer treatment: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy.
- Expert: with the standard deli sandwich, “you’re literally eating a heart bomb.” (WSJ)
Thursday Links
- Congressional health program suffers “significant data breach” affecting “hundreds” of lawmakers, staff.
- Bill Frist: the benefit from implementing value-based payment models has been modest, and so far has not resulted in significant savings to payers, providers, or patients. No surprise: they were all designed by the buyers of care – something that happens in no other market.
- “We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded.”
- Site neutral payments (independent of hospital, clinic, doctor’s office, etc.) would save Medicare $158 billion over ten years.
- About half of the governmental public health workforce left their jobs between 2017 and 2021.