It’s called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, an arm of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Since its creation in 1951, the service has become a bulwark in the nation’s defense system against disease, often acting as the public’s emergency room. Its doctors have helped identify Legionnaires’ disease, Lyme disease, and toxic shock syndrome from superabsorbent tampons; stop outbreaks of diphtheria and other diseases before they could spread uncontrollably; discover the deadly Ebola and Lassa viruses; and trace paralyzing cases of polio to defective batches of the Salk vaccine.
Not if it's funded, orchestrated or organized by the payer side of the market anyway. This will be a huge disappointment to our friends at Commonwealth, the CMS, the RWJ Foundation and right-thinking people everywhere. But here it is in an article [gated, but with abstract] in Health Affairs:
Since 1999, the CMS has conducted seven DM demonstrations involving some 300,000 beneficiaries in thirty-five programs… Results from the CMS demonstrations have not shown widespread evidence of improvement in compliance with evidence-based care, satisfaction for providers or beneficiaries, or broad behavior change. Only a few programs have produced financial savings net of fees.
This is from an article in the New York Times:
The nature vs. nurture debate is over:
Behavioral genetics has repeatedly found that the "shared environment" – everything that siblings growing up in the same home have in common, including their parents, their neighborhood, their home, their peer group and their school – has less of an influence on the way they turn out than their genes.
Our genes become more important as we age:
A common finding is that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Continue reading Stephen Pinker on Genes →
Reimbursement rates are so low, and billing the program so complicated, that it is hard for internists to get beneficiaries access to specialized care or timely interventions. For patients, many of whom are uneducated or don't speak English, Medicaid is replete with paperwork, regulations and rejections that make the program hard to navigate, writes Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Accumulating evidence shows that Medicaid recipients' poor health outcomes aren't just a function of their underlying medical problems, but a more direct consequence of the program's shortcomings. Take the treatment of serious heart conditions: Continue reading Update on the Left’s Favorite Health Plan →
Newly empowered patients are creating social networking sites that enable them to run their own clinical trials.
Humberto Macedo in Brazil who has ALS heard of some success in Italy of ALS being slowed by the use of lithium. “No company would be willing to finance a confirming trial of a drug that went off patent decades ago, against a disease that strikes only 4 to 8 people per 100,000. So Macedo stepped up, proposing to fellow PatientsLikeMe members that they test it themselves.” 250 ALS patients participated, keeping track of their experience on a detailed spreadsheet. As it turns out, using lithium did not slow the progression of the disease, so in this case the experience debunked a theory. But isn’t that how science progresses?
Cancer is not cancer, it turns out. For breast cancer, there are seven distinct diseases. All the new research is focused on tailoring drugs to each cancer subtype. Herceptin is an example. It costs $40,000 for a 12-week course. Even then it only helps half the patients.
A movie, Living Proof, about the developer of Herceptin will appear on Lifetime this Saturday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. [link]
Health Care Policy and Reform Insights | NCPA
