[medscape]  The American Medical Association (AMA) today announced its qualified support for Democratic healthcare reform legislation scheduled to come before the House this Sunday for a historic vote.
“The pending bill isn’t perfect, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” AMA President J. James Rohack, MD, said at a press conference Friday.
The [...]

[NYTimes] Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday.
But at least one expert maintains that the prices are still too high.
The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the [...]

[WSJ] The biggest transformation of the U.S. health system in decades won approval on Capitol Hill late Sunday, the culmination of efforts by generations of Democrats to achieve near-universal health coverage.

Facing voters’ judgment in the fall, Democrats bet they could overcome public misgivings on a bill that reshapes one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The final [...]

[AAP] Disability groups are split over a Family Court decision to approve the sterilisation of an 11-year-old girl.
Family Court judge Paul Cronin found that the performance of a hysterectomy on the child, identified only as Angela, was “in the child’s best interests”. Angela has Rett syndrome, making her profoundly disabled and unable to talk or [...]

[AP]  An American infertility clinic is offering free human eggs to one British participant for attending an informational seminar Wednesday in London.
The promotion, which has been described by some as a raffle, has sparked an ethical debate in Britain about whether women should be paid for their eggs — which is illegal in the European [...]

[Philly.com] Hey, buddy, can you spare a kidney?
What if you got $10,000 for your trouble? $100,000? Or more?
With 106,131 Americans now on waiting lists for an organ – 83,754 of them for kidneys – researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center sought to find out whether financial incentives would increase [...]

[Reuters] – The most commonly used tool for detecting prostate cancer, routine PSA screening, has become “a hugely expensive public health disaster,” its discoverer said on Wednesday.
Dr. Richard Ablin of the University of Arizona joined the ongoing debate over the blood test, saying the screening procedure is too costly and ineffective.  “I never dreamed that [...]

[kaiserhealthnews] Marilyn Matthews has no job, no health insurance, and until now, no chance of qualifying for Medicaid. She’s unquestionably poor — her last regular paycheck was more than three years ago — and would meet the income criteria for Medicaid. The rub is that Matthews, 51, is a healthy adult with no children.
While Medicaid [...]

[NEJM] Early in 2009, members of major health care–related industries such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical device makers, and hospitals all agreed to forgo some future profits to show support for the Obama administration’s health care reform efforts. Skeptics have questioned the value of these promises, regarding at least some of them as more [...]

“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]