| Universal health care gains support
The call for universal health care in Arizona has gone mainstream. The venerable Arizona Town Hall, meeting last week in Prescott, recommended a statewide program to ensure everyone in the state has access to basic health care. The group of 150 community leaders also called for expanded efforts to enroll children in federally funded health insurance programs and beefed-up mental health coverage. I was just amazed. Its a real sea change, said Carol Ann Lockhart of Tempe, a longtime health care consultant. People are saying its a messed up system. Weve got to fix it, Lockhart said. And it needs to be fixed so everybody can get care. Rising health care premiums and shrinking employer-based coverage mean that, more and more, the 18 percent of Arizonans who are uninsured includes a growing middle class.
Ministry of Health to get tough on illegal ads
BEIJING, April 28 -- Cracking down on misleading advertisements and companies that provide unsafe beauty treatments will be the priorities of a new campaign to be launched by the Ministry of Health in a bid to regulate the healthcare market. Advertisements for medical products can sometimes be misleading, exaggerating the function or effects a certain product might have. In the worst cases, the use of some products can cause illness or even death. Earlier this year, a new regulation on advertisements for medical services was implemented, which aimed to stop companies from exaggerating the effects of treatments by banning the use of any disease names. Under the regulation, an advert can reveal no more than the name of the medical institution, its address and phone number, specialty and qualifications, type of ownership, number of beds and opening hours.
Letters: Column on reporting failure of abstinence-only on target
Every single point made in this article (Wendy Suzuki column, April 10) is right on target, but abstinence-only programs dont fail women alone. Abstinence-only education is not only scientifically flawed, it is fiscally irresponsible and fails us all. It is time to seriously contemplate the long-term fiscal ramifications of espousing abstinence-only sexuality education programs, in which young people learn little or nothing about contraception.
The research is in. A federally-funded study (part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health) found that 88 percent of teenage girls who take virginity pledges eventually have premarital sex, and these pledge breakers are more likely to engage in unprotected sex. According to the CDC, at least two-thirds of American teenage females have had sex by the time they reach age 18, and over the course of any given year, 90 percent of teenagers engaging in heterosexual sex without contraceptives become pregnant.
Health Care: 20% U.S. Spending in 2016
Health care will account for nearly 20 cents of every dollar spent in the U.S. in 2016, government experts predict. If so, America's health care tab will be nearly twice as large as in 2006. U.S. health care spending weighed in at $2.1 trillion last year. By 2016, the figure is projected to jump to $4.1 trillion, according to a government report published in Health Affairs. Researchers included John Poisal, deputy director of the National Health Statistics Group, which is part of the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The report predicts the annual growth rate for prescription drug spending will soar from 7.4% in 2007 to nearly 10% in 2016. The growth in health care spending on hospitals, expected to be about 7% starting this year, is predicted to keep that pace through 2016, according to the report.
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