New California rule aims to limit health care cost increases to 3% annually
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies in California will be limited to annual price increases of 3% starting in 2029 under a new rule state regulators approved Wednesday in the latest attempt to corral the ever-increasing costs of medical care in the United States.
The money Californians spent on health care went up about 5.4% each year for the past two decades. Democrats who control California’s government say that’s too much, especially since most people’s income increased just 3% each year over that same time period.
The 3% cap, approved Wednesday by the Health Care Affordability Board, would be phased in over five years, starting with 3.5% in 2025. Board members said the cap likely won’t be enforced until the end of the decade.
A new state agency, the Office of Health Care Affordability, will gather data to enforce the rule. Providers who don’t comply could face fines.
“We want to be aggressive,” board chair Dr. Mark Ghaly said, while acknowledging that the cap “really translates into a major challenge” for the health care industry.
The vote is just the start of the process. Regulators will later decide how the cost target will be applied across the state’s various health care sectors. And enforcement will be progressive, with several chances for providers to avoid fines.
California’s health care industry has supported the idea of a statewide cost target but argued a 3% cap is too low and will be nearly impossible to meet. In December, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the cost to practice medicine in the United States would increase 4.6% this year alone.
The board based the target on the average annual change in median household income in California between 2002 and 2022, which was 3%. Dr. Tanya W. Spirtos, president
Biden moves to shield patients’ abortion records from GOP threats
Under previous rules, organizations were allowed to disclose private medical information to law enforcement in certain cases, such as a criminal investigation. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services said they had heard from patients and providers who were confused about their legal risks or had even deferred care amid GOP threats in the nearly two dozen states with abortion restrictions.
“People feel scared to confide in their providers. People are worried in this new climate about how their medical information might be used,” said Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the civil rights office at HHS, which revamped the rules. “The goal here is to reinstate trust into the provider medical relationship. … The goal here is that people don’t stay home if they’re too scared to get care.”
Monday’s announcement is the latest effort by the Biden administration intended to safeguard reproductive health care,
Melania Trump — and her clothes — inch back into the spotlight
Whether conscious or not — she continued to pay the stylist she relied on during her time in the White House, Hervé Pierre Braillard, through her husband’s Save America PAC at least through the middle of last year — Melania speaks with her clothes, even when the messages aren’t quite clear.
So when she appeared Saturday evening for her first political event since her husband, Donald Trump, became the unofficial Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, it felt impossible to resist asking: What is she trying to say?
While the former president prepared for the first day of hearings in his Manhattan criminal trial, Melania hosted a closed-door fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago for the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBT advocacy group.
Dressed in a black blazer with a wraparound belt and a pair of cigarette leg pants, she grinned, practically glowed, in an Instagram post by her co-host, Richard Grenell, a public relations consultant who served as ambassador to Germany during the Trump administration. Melania is a longtime friend of the group, which gave her its Spirit of Lincoln Award in 2021. She posted a rare message on her
First Nations patients more often leave ER without care: study
First Nations patients are more likely to leave Alberta emergency departments before receiving care than other patients — and anti-Indigenous racism is a significant reason why, a new study says.
“The stories are incredibly powerful,” said Patrick McLane, the lead author of the study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
“First Nations people have said (that) sometimes it’s really obvious when there’s racism, but sometimes it’s not and it’s always present as a possibility,” McLane, an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine with the University of Alberta, said in an interview.
Although the study was conducted in Alberta, the findings likely apply to emergency department visits across Canada, he said.
The researchers had previously analyzed data from more than 11.6 million emergency department visits in Alberta between April 2012 and March 2017. More than one million of those visits were made by First Nations patients.
The analysis found 6.8 per cent of First Nations patients left emergency departments either before being seen or against medical advice. That’s compared to just 3.7 per cent of non-First Nations patients.
In the current study, the researchers wanted to see if there were any other factors that could explain the discrepancy, so they went back to the data and controlled for several variables including patient demographics, reasons for coming to the emergency department and geography.
At the end of that analysis, First Nations status was the only apparent explanation for the difference in rates of leaving before receiving care, the study found.
“Leaving without completing care matters because it delays needed care and interrupts the care journey,” said Bonnie Healy, co-author of the study and former executive director of the Alberta First Nations Information Governance Centre, which was a partner in conducting the
WHO expands which pathogens can be transmitted through the air
In the chaotic first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, stores faced shortages of all kinds — toilet paper, canned food, and especially, cleaning supplies. With everyone scrubbing their groceries, mail, even library books, good luck finding antibacterial wipes or disinfectant sprays back then. That’s because public health advice in early 2020 focused on sanitizing surfaces, not protecting against a virus that could be spread through the air.
Much of that guidance could be traced back to the World Health Organization, which stated early on, and unequivocally, that Covid-19 was not an airborne disease. Even as evidence grew that coronavirus-laced particles could linger in the air indoors and infect people nearby, and researchers raised the alarm about the risks this posed to health care workers and the general public, the WHO didn’t acknowledge that Covid was airborne until late 2021.
Part of what took so long was an entrenched disconnect between how different kinds of scientists and physicians use words like “aerosol”, “airborne” and “airborne transmission.” Those differences sowed confusion and escalated into a series of ugly skirmishes on social media.
To address the confusion and the ensuing controversy, in November 2021, the WHO assembled a group of experts to update its formal guidelines for classifying the different routes that pathogens take from one person to another.
On Thursday, after more than two years of discussions, that group published a report outlining a new set of definitions that more accurately reflect the state of the science of disease transmission. The experts divided transmission into routes that involve direct contact through touching infected surfaces or other people and others that involve the air. The latter route was dubbed “through the air transmission” and was further subdivided into “direct deposition,” which refers to larger particles that strike the mucus membranes of
OPINION: Bill Maher is right about Canadian health care
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Recently, popular American comedian and talk show host Bill Maher took aim at some of Canada’s public policy failings in one of his monologues. In entertaining fashion, Maher highlighted our high housing costs, unemployment rates and “vaunted” health-care system.
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N.S. news: Privacy breach at Nova Scotia Health
A former employee at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital, in Antigonish, N.S., inappropriately accessed the personal health information of 2,690 people, according to a news release from Nova Scotia Health.
The health authority says the person responsible has been terminated and it is in the process of sending letters to those who were affected.
“Nova Scotia Health views this as a summary offence under the Personal Health Information Act and the RCMP are currently investigating,” reads the release.
“All those affected will hear directly from Nova Scotia Health and we will be available to discuss the details of these breaches with them.”
When asked what role the employee played at the hospital, Nova Scotia Health would only say it was not “clinical in nature.”
The health authority said suspicious activity was identified in September and the employee was immediately suspended. As the investigation unfolded, the employee was eventually fired in November.
Nova Scotia Health says registration, demographic and clinical information was accessed.
“While we maintain confidence in the ethical practices of employees throughout our organization, we are extremely disappointed that an employee of Nova Scotia Health would engage in activity of this nature,” reads the release.
When asked why it took so long to release this information to the public, Nova Scotia Health’s chief financial officer Derek Spinney said they needed time to figure out the scope of the breach.
“We had enough information initially to understand there was inappropriate activity,” said Spinney.
“We didn’t have a fulsome understanding of the magnitude.”
To that end, Spinney says the health authority used software to cast a net around potential breaches, and then an investigator would look at each individual record to see if there were signs it had been
17 Sustainable Fashion Brands to Know and Shop 2024, According to Experts
It’s a common experience: In an effort to be a more eco-conscious consumer, you start researching sustainable fashion brands. You find a clothing company that uses all the buzzwords you know are important—clean, circular, transparent—and buy an item that catches your eye. But it’s itchy and rough on the skin when it arrives a few days later. You inspect the tag and find a confusing list of polyester blends, none of which align with the organic, earth-friendly vision initially advertised. It hits you that the brand likely isn’t as sustainable as it promised. You’ve been greenwashed.
Marina Testino, a sustainability strategist who works with brands like Stella McCartney and Gucci and organizations like Greenpeace and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, developed a comprehensive checklist to help people avoid the faux-eco pitfall.
Testino calls it the “Five Pillars of Conscious Fashion:” To assess a brand’s environmental impact, look for sustainably sourced materials, either “recycled, organic, upcycled, or biodegradable;” a responsible production process (how many collections the brand offers a year, if pieces are made to order); transparency on “where fabrics are sourced and by whom garments are made;” carbon emissions management (zero-waste processes, re-purposing textiles, etc.); and the brand’s social responsibility, including fair labor operations and community involvement.
Maria McManus, a New York-based label offering contemporary heirlooms, is a brand Testino spotlights for its legitimate sustainable strides.
(Image credit: Maria McManus)
A clothing label doesn’t need to tick every single box on Testino’s list to qualify as sustainable. “If a brand is making an effort with at least two of the five pillars, that signals a genuine commitment to conscious values and solutions,” she says. It’s more important that the brand is genuine with its mission and has proof to substantiate its efforts. “No brand
West Virginia confirms first measles case since 2009
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A West Virginia hospital has confirmed the first known case of measles in the state since 2009, health officials said Monday.
The Monongalia County Health Department said WVU Medicine alerted officials Sunday that an adult patient living in the county tested positive for the viral infection. Health officials have not pinpointed exactly where and how the patient was exposed but said the person had recently traveled abroad.
The patient — who was partially vaccinated against measles, having received one of two doses — had developed symptoms, sought medical treatment through the WVU Medicine system and was instructed to stay home while awaiting lab results.
One of the world’s most contagious diseases, measles can lead to potentially serious complications.
Dr. Brian H. Huggins, the county health department’s incoming health officer, said the department is working with the hospital to identify people who came into contact with the patient.
“We really want to emphasize that this is an illness that people should take very seriously,” Huggins said.
Nationwide, measles cases this year already are nearly double the total for all of 2023, raising health experts’ concerns about the preventable, once-common childhood virus. Health officials have confirmed measles cases in at least 17 other states so far this year, including cases in New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented 113 cases as of April 5. There have been seven outbreaks and most U.S. cases — 73% — are linked to those flare-ups.
Still, the count is lower than some recent years: 2014 saw 667 cases and 2019 had 1,274.
Most U.S. cases are brought into the country by people who traveled where measles is far more common.
Huggins said West Virginia has not seen a case since 2009 largely due to
Is this the most disgusting health advice ever? Home cook torn to shreds over ‘healthy’ alternative to pasta and noodles
A home cook has been slammed by hundreds for sharing a ‘disgusting’ low-carb alternative to noodles or pasta.
The man behind the ‘Keto Diet & Low-Carb Recipes’ Facebook page boasted about finding the ‘miracle’ dish having been on a keto diet for more than three years.
The home cook sliced a Guerrero low-carb tortilla, poured boiling water over the top then drained it to make low-carb soggy ‘noodles’.
But the simple meal left others gagging with one labelling it as an ‘abomination’ and another declaring it as the ‘worst thing they’ve ever seen’.
Each tortilla contains 2g of carbs, high fibre, no sugar or fat and 50 calories – far less compared to pasta or noodles.
A home cook used tortilla strips to make a ‘healthy’ version of pasta and noodles (pictured)
To make dish he poured boiling water over the tortilla strips, then drained it and sprinkled some spices on top. But the simple meal left others gagging with one labelling it as an ‘abomination’ and another declaring it as the ‘worst thing they’ve ever seen’
‘Never have I ever dreamed of eating real noodles on keto. Three plus years and I’ve just discovered this miracle,’ the post read.
After sharing the method he wrote: ‘Whala, fresh noodles. I added some butter, garlic powder, chili flakes, salt and pepper. I feel like I am straddling two worlds.’
Without context the food looks like a sad, bland plate of pasta that’s been lightly seasoned.
The recipe was laughed at by other home cooks who were left in disbelief.
The recipe was laughed at by other home cooks who were left in disbelief (stock image)
‘This is an