The Health News USA March 1 2018

• A coalition of 20 U.S. states sued the federal government on Monday over Obamacare, claiming the law was no longer constitutional after the repeal last year of its requirement that people have health insurance or pay a fine. Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, the lawsuit said that without the individual mandate, which was eliminated as part of the Republican tax law signed by President Donald Trump in December, Obamacare was unlawful. Paxton and Schimel, both Republicans, were joined in the lawsuit by eighteen states including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Utah and West Virginia. It was filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas.
• An Idaho House panel on Monday spiked a proposal that would have allowed health insurance carriers to offer non-Obamacare approved plans, while also imposing new requirements for Medicaid recipients. The bill was submitted by the Statehouse’s self-described “liberty legislators” as an alternative to a separate proposal already introduced in the Statehouse designed to reduce Idaho’s health coverage gap. About 78,000 working Idahoans are believed to be in the gap population that earns too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to qualify for insurance subsidies.
• A new study has found that among adults 55 and younger, women may be more likely than men to experience lesser-known acute heart attack symptoms in addition to chest pain. The study suggests that more than half of the doctors seeing women who seek care for those symptoms, prior to being hospitalized, might not even realize that the symptoms are heart-related.  Misinterpreting such heart attack symptoms could put young women at a greater risk of death than similarly aged men.
  

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 1st of March 2018. Read by Tabetha Moreto.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare/twenty-states-sue-federal-government-seeking-end-to-obamacare-idUSKCN1GB06R

A coalition of twenty U.S. states sued the federal government on Monday over Obamacare, claiming the law was no longer constitutional after the repeal last year of its requirement that people have health insurance or pay a fine. Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, the lawsuit said that without the individual mandate, which was eliminated as part of the Republican tax law signed by President Donald Trump in December, Obamacare was unlawful.
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The U.S. Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the Trump administration would defend the law in court. The individual mandate in Obamacare was meant to ensure a viable health insurance market by forcing younger and healthier Americans to buy coverage.

Republicans have opposed the two thousand ten law formally known as the Affordable Care Act, the signature domestic policy achievement of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, since its inception. Paxton and Schimel, both Republicans, were joined in the lawsuit by eighteen states including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Utah and West Virginia. It was filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Idaho-House-panel-spikes-health-care-alternative-12709581.php

An Idaho House panel on Monday spiked a proposal that would have allowed health insurance carriers to offer non-Obamacare approved plans, while also imposing new requirements for Medicaid recipients. The bill was submitted by the Statehouse’s self-described “liberty legislators” as an alternative to a separate proposal already introduced in the Statehouse designed to reduce Idaho’s health coverage gap.

Republican Representative Bryan Zollinger from Idaho Falls whose bill dubbed the “non-affordable care act,” would have directed the Idaho Department of Insurance to permit insurance carriers to offer plans that don’t meet the requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

It also said adult Medicaid recipients should hold jobs and limits lifetime participation in the federal program to five years for certain recipients. For example, children, pregnant women and people with disabilities would have still been exempt from coverage limits. According to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, placing a work requirement on able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients would affect seven hundred people and putting a lifetime limit on some Medicaid recipients would apply to roughly eleven thousand people. There are seventy eight thousand adults receiving Medicaid in Idaho.
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One waiver would allow low-income individuals to qualify for subsidies available to higher-income individuals. The other would expand Medicaid eligibility to make room for twelve serious and costly medical conditions.

About seventy eight thousand working Idahoans are believed to be in the gap population that earns too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to qualify for insurance subsidies.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/19/health/heart-attack-symptoms-women-study/index.html

A new study has found that among adults fifty five and younger, women may be more likely than men to experience lesser-known acute heart attack symptoms in addition to chest pain. The study suggests that more than half of the doctors seeing women who seek care for those symptoms, prior to being hospitalized, might not even realize that the symptoms are heart-related.  Misinterpreting such heart attack symptoms could put young women at a greater risk of death than similarly aged men. These differences between symptoms, and how they’re interpreted in men and women, are spotlighted in the study, published in the journal Circulation on Monday.
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The new study highlights how most women and men both experience chest pain as the predominant symptom of a heart attack, but women tend to experience a greater number of additional non-chest pain symptoms. Those additional symptoms in women can be dangerously misunderstood.
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Though the study does not dive into the scale of that increased risk, a previous report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology shows that between two thousand one and two thousand ten, the rate of in-hospital heart attack deaths for women ranged from three point three percent to two point three percent, whereas the rate for men ranged from two percent to one point eight percent.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, someone in the US has a heart attack every forty seconds. While in the UK someone will have a heart attack every seven minutes, according to the charity Heart UK. Cardiovascular diseases, such as coronary heart disease, are the leading cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. The new study included two thousand nine women and nine hundred seventy nine men, ages eighteen to fifty five, who had been hospitalized in the US for having an acute heart attack between August two thousand eight and January two thousand twelve.

One hundred and three hospitals across the country were included in the study. Shortly after their heart attack, the patients were interviewed and asked whether they had seen their doctor in the week before going to the hospital. They also were asked whether their doctor told them that their symptoms might be related to a heart problem.