[Boston.com] Top executives of the state’s two largest biotechnology companies offered diverging views today on the health care bill signed into law by President Obama, with one contending it protects innovation and the other insisting it does little to control costs. “I don’t think this health care reform really addresses the fundamental underlying issues that [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

In 1951, doctors removed Henrietta Lacks’s cells without her consent. More than half a century later, companies have made millions from her cell culture, while few of Lacks’s descendants can even afford insurance.
[Newsweek] The unsettling story of Henrietta Lacks begins with an everyday occurrence: a trip to the doctor’s office. The 30-year-old African-American’s 1951 diagnosis [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]