Tag Archives: Weekly News

Health care in America costs more than in other industrialized nation and we aren’t even getting the world’s best care for our dollars, according to a new study. The United States spent $7,960 per capita on health care in 2009, the most of 13 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Continue reading →

A study released on Thursday shows that one in four working-age Americans went without insurance at some point in 2011, often as a result of unemployment and other job changes. The study by the Commonwealth Fund polled 2,100 people aged 19 to 64 and found that 26 percent of non-elderly adults went without insurance — a percentage that researchers said equals about 48 million people when measured against U.S. Census data. Continue reading →

Half of all cancers could be prevented if people just adopted healthier behaviors, US scientists argued on Wednesday.  Smoking is blamed for a third of all US cancer cases and being overweight leads to another 20 percent of the deadly burden that costs the United States some $226 billion per year in health care expenses and lost productivity. Continue reading →

Type 1 diabetes — the autoimmune disease that begins in childhood and used to be called juvenile-onset diabetes — is rising, around the globe, at 3 percent to 5 percent per year. And at this point, no one can quite say why. Continue reading →

U.S. drug regulators need further clinical data, possibly including new clinical studies, before approving a new diabetes drug from AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb.  The two companies said on Thursday they had received a so-called “complete response letter” from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for dapagliflozin as a treatment for type 2 diabetes in adults. Continue reading →

Two researchers at Johns Hopkins University say that doctors and other researchers can discover useful information on social media with a little bit of effort. They analyzed more than two billion tweets for health-related terms and say their research shows Twitter can be a valuable source of public-health information about a wide range of ailments.  Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be a useful source of public health information. We determined that indeed they could. In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters’ doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home. Continue reading →

The amount of health care spending by American families going up while consumers confidence in paying for health care going down.  The average annual cost of health care for a family of four covered by a PPO plan grew 7.3%, from $18,074 in 2010 to $19,393 in 2011, according to the 2011 Milliman Medical Index released May 11. The percentage change was slightly less than in previous years, and the total includes the employers’ share of costs.  More stories—> Continue reading →

Google Inc is close to settling a U.S. criminal probe into allegations that it made hundreds of millions of dollars from online pharmacy ads that break U.S. laws, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Earlier this week the Internet search giant said it had set aside $500 million to potentially settle a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into its online advertising practices. More headline summaries—> Continue reading →