KHN: Kaiser Health News

Every week, KHN reporter Shefali S. Kulkarni selects interesting reading from around the Web.

New York Magazine: A Life Worth Ending
I will tell you, what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it? … In 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million—approaching 5 percent of the population. … By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources. … The longer you live the longer it will take to die (Michael Wolff, 5/20).

CNN: Cost Of Children’s Health Care Hitting Families Harder
[Heather Bixler] was leaving her New York apartment with her 4-year-old daughter and infant son, who was in a baby carriage. … The doorman, perhaps just to play around, picked up the stroller and held it almost vertical. Sean, the baby, fell out. His head bashed against the marble stair. … Two years ago, the seizures started. So did the never-ending medical expenses. The Bixler family is just one example of how a child’s chronic illness can strain a family emotionally and financially — and children represent the fastest growing health care spending group in America, according to a new report (Elizabeth Landau, 5/21).

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Every week, Kaiser Health News reporter Shefali S. Kulkarni selects interesting reading from around the Web.

ABC News: Early Burdens: Eldercare Falls on Young Shoulders
At 30, Suzette Armijo cares for her widowed 86-year-old grandmother, a retired National Park Service ranger in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, while holding down a fulltime job, a part-time job and raising a 4-year-old son. “This was nothing that I had planned for,” says Armijo, who moved her grandmother Elizabeth Armijo into a nearby six-bed assisted living home because veterans’ benefits “wouldn’t pay for her to live with me.” … Armijo is among a generation of young adult caregivers, the majority of whom are women, navigating tough turf without a roadmap. … As they try to tap into resources to help an ailing grandmother, Mom or Dad, these 20-somethings and 30-somethings are often on a lonely road (Jane E. Allen, 5/4).

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Every week, Kaiser Health News reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.

National Journal: Why We Trust Doctors
This patient is no fool, and she does’t award trust liberally. … Yet, somehow, (Mary) Morse-Dwelley never lost faith in Pellegrini. She’d hear the click of her doctor’s shoes in the hallway, see her blond hair and funky glasses, and feel confident that she was in good hands. This, too, represents a broad trend: As we have become better-informed patients, we have grown more cynical about a health care system that is ever more corporate and reliant on technology. Nevertheless, our faith in physicians has proved incredibly durable. Gallup, which has polled on public trust in professionals every year since 1976, reports high and rising marks for doctors. In the latest survey, from 2011, 70 percent of respondents rated medical doctors as high or very high when asked about their “honesty and ethical standards,” a record. When the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans whom they trusted in 2009—the height of the debate over the health care law—78 percent said they believed that their doctors put patients’ interests ahead of their own (Margot Sanger-Katz, 4/26).

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Every week, Kaiser Health News reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.

Newsweek: The Doctor Will See You–If You’re Quick
Something in the world of medicine is seriously amiss. Unhappy patients gripe about their doctors’ brusque manner and give them bad marks on surveys and consumer websites like HealthGrades and Angie’s List. They tell tales of being rushed out of the office by harried doctors who miss crucial diagnoses, never look up from their computers during an exam, make errors in prescriptions, and just plain don’t listen to their patients. … And things don’t seem much better from the other side of the stethoscope. In a recent survey by Consumer Reports, 70 percent of doctors reported that since they began practicing medicine, the bond with their patients has eroded (Shannon Brownlee, 4/16).

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Every week, Kaiser Health News reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.

Time: Can Autism Really Be Diagnosed In Minutes?
Autism is an extremely complex diagnosis. Parental insight, physician observations and hours of data can factor into determining whether a child actually has the condition or is just a little on the quirky side. Now a Harvard researcher, Dennis P. Wall, has published research about a Web-based tool he developed that promises to diagnose autism in minutes, not hours — a proposition that Wall has floated for some time now and has some autism experts so skeptical they’re not even willing to speak on the record about it. Wall, director of the computational biology initiative at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and associate professor of pathology at the school, combines computer algorithms along with a seven-point parent questionnaire and a home video clip to make a speedy online assessment of whether a child has autism (Bonnie Rochman, 4/11).

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Every week, reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.

Rolling Stone: Don Berwick On The Fate Of ‘Obamacare’
Between July 2010 and December 2011, Dr. Donald Berwick was head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that runs the government’s health insurance programs. In a sane world, he would be still. But Senate Republicans refused even to let his confirmation come up for a vote. … A pediatrician by training and a widely respected expert in health care policy, Berwick should have been a lock for the CMS job. But he was a backer of Obamacare; a believer in data and science; a proponent of universal health care. … Rolling Stone got him on the phone to talk about this week’s healthcare hearings at the Supreme Court, the importance of Obamacare, and the future of reform (Julian Brookes, 3/30).

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Every week, reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reads from around the Web.

Huffington Post: Women’s Health Care Is Stronger Thanks To The Health Care Law
In many families, women are the health care decision makers. When children go for their checkups, we are often the ones who make the appointment and sit in the room holding their hand. When elderly parents see a new specialist, we are the ones carrying the folder with all their health information. … In the past, this also meant that many women would take care of their own health last. By the time they got around to it, women found a system stacked against them. But thanks to the health care law, that’s changed (Kathleen Sebelius, 3/20).

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Every week, reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reads from around the Web.

Time: Peter Goodwin: The Dying Doctor’s Last Interview (Video)
Dr. Peter Goodwin, a family physician and right-to-die activist, took his own life on March 11, 2012, at age 83. He did it legally, with the blessing of his family and doctors, under the Oregon law allowing physician-assisted suicide — the first such law in the country — that Goodwin was instrumental in creating. … He did not look like a dying man; he was chirpy and alert … However, as a result of his fatal disease — a Parkinsons-like condition called coritcobasal degeneration — he could not use his right hand or do much reliably with his left. … “I can no longer eat in public,” Goodwin said. “My balance is gradually deteriorating. My three doctors agree that I’m within six months of dying. My attending physician has given me a prescription for medication to end my life and I have had it filled” (Belinda Luscombe, 3/14).

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Every week, reporter Jessica Marcy selects interesting reading from around the Web.

Mother Jones: Santorum In ’93: More Government Needed in Health Care
If elected president, Santorum vows, he will end the “tyranny” of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Yet as an up-and-coming congressman in the early 1990s, Santorum took a much different line. Then—like now—health care was one of the nation’s most divisive issues. In 1993, Republicans were up in arms about a health care reform bill spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and pushed by President Bill Clinton. … During that fiery debate, Santorum said it would be a mistake to allow the delivery of health care services to be determined only by the market. He asserted that Republicans were “wrong” to let the marketplace decide how health care works. He instead argued that government should play a “proactive” role in shaping the health care marketplace “to make it work better” (Andy Kroll and Tim Murphy, 3/5).

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This week’s selection of intriguing weekend reading includes articles from Slate, the Los Angeles Times, American Medical News, Salon, Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, BBC and Medscape.

Slate: The Conversion: How, When, And Why Mitt Romney Changed His Mind On Abortion
(GOP presidential candidate Mitt) Romney began his political career as a pro-choicer. In the story he tells, he had an epiphany, a flash of insight, and committed himself thereafter to protecting life. But that isn’t what happened. The real story of Romney’s conversion—a series of tentative, equivocal, and confused shifts, accompanied by a constant rewriting of his past—paints a more accurate picture of who he is. Romney has complex views and a talent for framing them either way, depending on his audience. He values truth, so he makes sure there’s an element of it in everything he says. He can’t stand to break his promises, so he reinterprets them (William Saletan, 2/22).

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