[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 [...]

[Physorg] In what doctors described Wednesday as a world first, a Danish woman has given birth to two children after her fertility was restored using ovarian tissue that was removed, frozen, thawed and then reimplanted after cancer treatment.
It is being hailed as a breakthrough for young women whose hope of one day becoming mothers could [...]

Thousands of preserved human embryos will be disposed of next week following the implementation of a federal law that bars fertility clinics from conducting this medical procedure on religious grounds.
The Dubai Gynaecology and Fertility Centre that stores an estimated 5,000 eggs fertilised through In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) will start the disposal procedure next week, according to [...]

[reuters] The U.S. government broadened the definition of a human embryonic stem cell on Friday, helping qualify several corporate and academic experiments for federal funding.
Dr. Lana Skirboll, director of the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health, called the change technical and said it would be posted in the federal register for [...]

 [BBC] A former BBC presenter is being investigated in Britain after admitting he killed his lover.
Ray Gosling said the man he killed was suffering from Aids and in great pain.
Ray Gosling was arrested on Tuesday after he told a BBC documentary that he smothered the man. The admission and investigation has added to an already [...]

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 [...]

[RFERL]  In late December, Snezhana Mitina received a tearful phone call from her friend Svetlana. Sobbing, Svetlana explained she had just read a newspaper article calling for babies with mental disabilities to be killed at birth.
The author, Aleksandr Nikonov, used the word “debil” — a deeply offensive term in Russian — to characterize such children. He [...]