Medicare Premiums Raised Again
Seniors face yet another increase in their health-care costs, thanks to the federal government.
The New York Times reported Saturday that basic Medicare premiums will go up again; this time the hike will be 13 percent, to $88.50 a month. Increased use of doctor's services is behind the latest increase, the Times reported.
Many beneficiaries will have to pay an additional premium for the much-touted new prescription drug benefit program, set to start Jan. 1, which should average $32 a month. The combined premiums will now average $120 a month, the Times reported.
Medicare premiums are typically deducted from monthly Social Security checks, which currently average $955 a month for retirees, the Times said. Medicare provides medical coverage to 42 million people who are older or disabled.
The basic Medicare premium has gone up by nearly $30 a month, or 51 percent, from 2003 to 2006, Kirsten A. Sloan, a health policy analyst at AARP, told the Times.
Cleveland Clinic Doctor to Attempt First Face Transplant
A Cleveland Clinic doctor will soon try a radical surgery that has never been performed before when she attempts a face transplant, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
Seven women and five men will travel to the Cleveland Clinic in the coming weeks to be examined by Dr. Maria Siemionow, according to the AP. The surgeon will study their facial features and ask them what they hope to gain by such a drastic procedure. They will be warned about the dangers and requirements: At worst, the transplant could be rejected and their new face could literally slough off; even in the best instance, they will have to take powerful immunosuppressant drugs for their rest of their lives, which could damage their kidneys and leave them susceptible to cancer.
Dr. Siemionow told the AP she hopes to one day be able to give people disfigured by burns or accidents a chance at a new life. Even the best current treatments still leave scar tissue that doesn't look or move like skin, according to the AP.
The planned procedure is not without controversy; concerns over the risks recently led hospitals in England and France to scrap plans for face transplants, the AP reported, and it took Dr. Siemionow's transplant team more than a year to secure the blessing of the clinic's institutional review board.
New Orleans Sludge Still Contaminated With Bacteria, Oil
Initial tests conducted on sediments taken after floodwaters receded in New Orleans show high amounts of E. coli bacteria and oil runoff from fuel and chemical plants, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday.
E. coli indicates there is fecal bacteria in the water and exposed sediment, and contact with both should be avoided, Marcus Peacock, the EPA's deputy administrator, told reporters Friday at a news conference, the agency's second this week. He said 18 sediment samples taken on Sept. 10 represented the start of "extensive" testing, the Bloomberg news service reported.
And flooded parts of New Orleans, which was 80 percent under water after Hurricane Katrina, include more than 60 chemical plants, oil refineries, and petroleum storage facilities, Bloomberg said.
The Coast Guard said Thursday that Hurricane Katrina may have spilled more than 7 million gallons of oil, about two-thirds of what was released in the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989, according to the Associated Press.
Contact with fuel oils can lead to skin and eye irritation, increased blood pressure, and headache, Bloomberg said.
Officials told Bloomberg that the full extent of the contamination probably won't be known until the city is completely pumped out, which they say could take until mid-October.
Defibrillator Problems on the Rise: FDA Study
Malfunctions in implanted heart devices called defibrillators were increasing even before a huge recall this summer by Guidant Corp., according to a joint study released Friday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Harvard University.
Defibrillators shock awkwardly beating hearts back into a normal rhythm. About 20 of every 1,000 devices malfunction, the researchers found. Those defects led to 31 deaths between 1990 and 2002, although that was a fraction of the more than 400,000 devices implanted during the span, the Associated Press reported.
Nonetheless, the study "points out the need for our agency to improve the way it regulates these products, and we're doing just that," Dr. Daniel Schultz, chief of the FDA's medical devices unit, told the AP.
The research was presented Friday at a daylong meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Washington, D.C., to discuss recent safety problems with defibrillators and other implanted cardiac devices, including pacemakers.
The study's leader, Dr. William Maisel of Harvard, found that from 1990 to 2002, 2.25 million pacemakers and 416,000 cardiac defibrillators were implanted in the United States. More than 17,000 of the devices had to be removed later due to malfunctions, the AP reported.
Equally troubling, 50 percent of the defibrillator malfunctions between 1990 and 2002 occurred within the last three years of that time period, the researchers said.
Guidant, and two other makers -- Medtronic and St. Jude Medical -- have recalled or issued warnings about more than 200,000 defibrillators since January, the wire service said. Guidant recently conceded that it waited three years before telling doctors and patients about an electrical defect in one of its models. The defect has been linked to two deaths, the AP reported.
Aspirin at Night May Lower Blood Pressure
Not only may daily aspirin prevent a heart attack, it could also lower blood pressure -- especially if taken at night, researchers have found.
Scientists from Spain, writing in the Sept. 20 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, said they randomly divided patients with mild hypertension into three groups: those who took aspirin in the morning, those who took it before bed, and those who didn't take aspirin at all.
After three months, blood pressure rose slightly among those who took aspirin in the morning, but fell in the group that took it at night. The group that didn't take aspirin at all saw only a very slight decline in blood pressure that wasn't statistically significant, the researchers at the University of Vigo said.
The authors and other experts said the results would have to be confirmed in future studies.
"Given the widespread use of aspirin, the prevalence of hypertension, and the ease in altering the time of aspirin administration, these results should be widely disseminated," Dr. Joseph Messer, from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said in a prepared statement from the American College of Cardiology. Messer wasn't directly connected to the research, the statement said.
'Second disaster' may follow Katrina: doctors
Doctors are bracing themselves for what they call a "second disaster" as New Orleans-area residents return to their devastated city.
While environmentalists warn of the long-term danger to health from possibly polluted floodwaters, and rumors of disease swirl, front-line emergency doctors say the actual health danger will come from accidents.
"The second wave of disaster is when you welcome the people back and the infrastructure of the city is not in place," said Dr. Peter Deblieux, an emergency room doctor at downtown New Orleans' Charity Hospital.
Officials in New Orleans and surrounding Jefferson Parish began allowing residents to return over the weekend and say everyone can come back by mid-week. But residents whose homes were not completely destroyed will confront fallen trees, wrecked roofs and streets full of nails.
Someone will have to clean it up.
"We will see the chainsaw people -- lacerations of the left thigh, lacerations of the left forearm," Deblieux said in an interview. "There will be people falling off the scaffolding."
Public health experts concur. After Hurricane Charley hit Florida in 2004, 77 percent of the deaths blamed on the hurricane were classified as unintentional injury.
Deblieux is concerned about plans to allow more than 180,000 people to return to New Orleans with only four area hospitals up and running, and only one of those in New Orleans proper.
Charity, the city's free public hospital, remains closed, its electricity panels destroyed by flooding. "Where will people get treatment?" asked Deblieux.
Some areas will continue to lack electricity and clean drinking water.
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who heads the federal recovery effort, voiced similar concerns. He noted that hurricane season is not over.
"If you bring significant amounts of people into New Orleans, you need an evacuation plan on how you're going to do that," he told CNN on Sunday.
INVISIBLE DANGERS
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is launching an education effort to caution people about the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning if they use generators.
While some areas have uncontaminated water, 90 percent of the population does not, the CDC said on Saturday.
"It is contaminated with human and animal waste. But there isn't this sort of toxic soup out there," said Dr. Tom Clark, an infectious disease specialist at the CDC.
The CDC and Environmental Protection Agency are both telling people to wash off mud or dirt as soon as possible and to avoid getting flood water on themselves.
There are heavy metals and oil products such as diesel fuel in the water -- but not huge amounts. And as the mud dries, some compounds, especially metals such as lead and arsenic, will remain in the dirt.
There has been some diarrhea but no epidemics and despite fears, evacuees are not spreading diseases widely. And if people are careful, the contaminated tap water should not pose any great threat, the CDC said.
"E. coli in general are normal flora of the gastrointestinal tracts of people and animals," Clark said.
Some are toxic -- such as the E. coli 0157 strain that can cause deadly food poisoning, especially in children.
The E. coli being measured in city water is not in itself especially harmful but rather means the water is contaminated. And that does not necessarily mean unusual diseases.
"A lot of the time what you see (after a disaster like this) is an increase of what was already there before," Clark said.
No comments:
Post a Comment