| Is Health Care Making You Better—or Dead?
Professor Regina Herzlinger has been studying the U.S. health care system for decades, advocating for consumer-driven reform as the best remedy. But the slow pace of change, which she attributes to a fat-cat network of insurers, policymakers, hospitals, and even employers, has her fed up. Her new book, Who Killed Health Care? adopts the emotional language of a manifesto in demanding change to make health care more responsive to customers, affordable to those in need, and a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship. Key concepts include: Today's American health care system is set up structurally to reward the major players—hospitals, health insurers, and lawmakers—while short-changing patients and taxpayers. Health care is not the hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurial activity one might expect from a $2 trillion industry.
Wildlife Returning To Chernobyl
The wilderness is encroaching over abandoned towns in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One of the elderly residents who refused to evacuate the contaminated area says packs of wolves have eaten two of her dogs, and wild boar trample through her cornfield. Scientist are divided as to whether or not the animals are flourishing in the highly radioactive environment: "Robert J. Baker of Texas Tech University says the mice and other rodents he has studied at Chernobyl since the early 1990s have shown remarkable tolerance for elevated radiation levels. But Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, a biologist who studies barn swallows at Chernobyl, says that while wild animals have settled in the area, they have struggled to build new populations." .
Many families think hospice care was great, came too late
Brown University researchers report in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management that 11.4 percent of the more than 100,000 respondents thought their relatives received hospice care too late. In Massachusetts, the figure was 12.6 percent. Vermont had the lowest rate, at 7.8 percent, and South Carolina had the highest, 15 percent. Among people whose relatives had only two days of hospice care, only 24 percent said that was too late, lead author Dr. Joan M. Teno said. "I think this relates to how well hospice programs rally the troops to make everything happen," she said. "The entire hospice team mobilizes very quickly. They go in there and they do a very intensive intervention for the last 24 or 48 hours." Test subjects: Check the fine print before signing on Sometimes the arms-length distance between academic researchers and the pharmaceutical companies that provide drugs for their clinical trials can lead to problems, Harvard scientists wrote in last week's New England Journal of Medicine.
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