Your wonderfully entertaining compiler of “The Friday Breeze,” Brianna Labuskes, is off today, so I’m jumping in to keep you abreast of this week’s vital health care news. Here’s what I found most fascinating, some of it far away from the headlines.
Let’s dive into my “Department of Health Studies,” where I found several worthy of your time.
First, the scourge of fentanyl drug overdoses is rising most sharply among African-Americans. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which did the study, said the synthetic opioid is also a factor in the rise of death rates across other demographic groups.
The Washington Post:
A group of academics studying anti-vaccination posts on Facebook found that it’s driving the sentiment. While 86 percent of the posters were women, their motivation varied from conspiracy — as in poliovirus does not exist and pesticides caused the clinical symptoms of polio — to a belief in alternative medicine — eating yogurt cures human papillomavirus.
Science Direct:
Many news outlets reported on and its heavily promoted ability to detect an irregular heartbeat. The which has not been published or peer-reviewed, concluded the watch works.
CNN:
Moving on to data, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issued its this week. It’s a user-friendly display of a matrix of health indicators that lets you spot the country’s trouble spots. This year’s report,, tried to get at the relationship of the cost of housing to health. “The research reveals that in the most segregated counties nearly one in four black households spends more than half their income on housing, compared with one in 10 white households.”
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:
Doctors will like this one: a study comparing . CEO salaries are five times higher than surgeons’ salaries, up from a ratio of 3-to-1 only 10 years earlier.
Healthcare Dive:
Drug prices remain the hot topic this week in health care news. The BBC looked at the compared with the prices in Great Britain and chortled a bit.
BBC News:
Elisabeth Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief of KHN, wrote an analysis in The New York Times of to cut insulin prices in the U.S. with an “authorized generic.” She writes, “It is, perhaps, a sign of how desperate Americans are for something — anything — to counteract the escalating price of drugs that Lilly’s move was greeted with praise rather than a collective ‘Huh?’”
The New York Times:
While we are on the topic of the high cost of health care, the federal government’s General Accountability Office and the sky-high bills the companies send patients. (KHN featured the problem in its “Bill of the Month” series and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did on the problem last year.) Bob Herman of Axios noted that the report found that the median price of medical helicopter transport in 2017 was $36,400.
Government Accountability Office:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a fabulous article by another KHN staffer, Fred Schulte, who with Erika Fry of Fortune magazine wrote about the mess that electronic health records have become. It’s long, but so good at illuminating a problem that is largely invisible to patients.
Fortune:
The Baltimore Sun produced a great graphic, a live in the city. The accompanying article says: “More than 14 million gallons of sewage-tainted water has washed into Baltimore streams over the past two months, but city officials haven’t alerted the public of the contamination.”
The Baltimore Sun:
Enjoy the weekend with this selection of things to read.
