[PharmPro] Going to the doctor in Puerto Rico has for years often meant getting in line. Now, it might mean getting on a plane. A medical exodus is taking place in the Caribbean territory as doctors and nurses flee for the U.S. mainland, seeking higher salaries and better reimbursement from insurers. Many of their patients, [...]

[Medline Plus] When doctors know what hospitals charge for certain lab tests, they order far fewer of them or look for cheaper alternatives, a new study finds. Currently, hospitals typically keep doctors and patients in the dark about the prices of medical services, which contributes to the enormous cost of health care in the United [...]

[The New York Times] Australia’s first death from XDR-TB — extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is nearly incurable — has alarmed health officials and added new heat to a debate over how to treat immigrants with dangerous diseases. That debate echoes one on the United States’ southern border. A long string of small Australian islands — [...]

[Los Angeles Times] A government attorney urged the Supreme Court to allow authorities to crack down on cash deals among prescription drug makers that delay the introduction of generic drugs and keep consumer prices high. The so-called pay-for-delay deals, which allow brand-name drug companies to keep cheaper generic drugs off the market for a time, [...]

[NPR] A blue-ribbon panel is urging stronger regulation of pharmaceuticals around the world to combat the growing problem of fake and poor-quality medicines. The quality problems and fake medicines have affected Americans. Fungal contamination of steroids made by a Massachusetts pharmacy, which sickened more than 700 people and killed 46, is one recent example. Other [...]

[Nature] Ann McFarlane is losing faith. In the first half of 2012, the Houston resident received four infusions of adult stem cells grown from her own fat. McFarlane has multiple sclerosis (MS), and had heard that others with the inflammatory disease had experienced improvements in mobility and balance after treatment. The infusions — which have [...]

[Kaiser Health News] Robert Brown was healthy, willing and a good match: So why not give a kidney to his wife, who otherwise would need dialysis? There was just one potential obstacle: Brown was 74, an age once unthinkable for a kidney donor. For this retired psychologist from Columbia, that wasn’t an issue. “I didn’t [...]

[ New York Times] Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the “fiscal cliff” bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs. The [...]

[Kaiser Health News] The Obama administration Friday urged cooperation between software companies and caregivers to prevent patient harm caused by faulty electronic records. But it stopped short of calling for regulation or a federal requirement to report computer mistakes that pose a risk to patients. We are saying to the vendors: Step up and prove [...]

[The New York Times] In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence. The researchers, at the University [...]