The Health News USA July 31 2017
Overview
- U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to end government payments to health insurers if Congress does not pass a new healthcare bill and goaded them to not abandon their seven-year quest to replace the Obamacare law.
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration aims to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes while exploring measures to move smokers toward e-cigarettes, in a major regulatory shift that sent traditional cigarette company stocks plunging.
- Anna Villarreal, a women’s health advocate and entrepreneur has created LifeStory Health, a Boston-based company that’s trying to develop the first noninvasive menstrual blood diagnostic test.
News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 31st of July 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto. Health New
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-trump-idUSKBN1AE0QQ
U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to end government payments to health insurers if Congress does not pass a new healthcare bill and goaded them to not abandon their seven-year quest to replace the Obamacare law. In a Twitter message on Saturday, Trump said “if a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!” The tweet came a day after Senate Republicans failed to muster enough votes to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare bill commonly known as Obamacare.The first part of Trump’s tweet appeared to be referring to the approximately eight billion dollars in cost-sharing reduction subsidies the federal government pays to insurers to lower the price of health coverage for low-income Americans.
The second part appeared to be a threat to end the employer contribution for Congress members and their staffs, who were moved from the normal federal employee healthcare benefits program onto the Obamacare insurance exchanges as part of the two thousand and ten healthcare law.Trump has previously threatened to suspend the payments to insurers, which are determined by the Department of Health and Human Services. In April, he threatened to end the payments if Democrats refused to negotiate over the healthcare bill.
Trump later urged Senate Republicans to try again on a health care vote. The Senate is in session for another week before it is scheduled to begin an August recess.
“Unless the Republican Senators are total quitters, Repeal & Replace is not dead! Demand another vote before voting on any other bill!” Trump said in a subsequent tweet.
Many insurers have been waiting for an answer from Trump or lawmakers on whether they will continue to fund the annual government subsidies. Without assurances, many plan to raise rates an additional twenty percent by an August sixteen deadline for premium prices.
Only twenty nine percent said they wanted Republicans in Congress to “continue working on a new healthcare bill.”Asked what they think Congress should do next, most respondents picked other priorities such as tax reform, foreign relations and infrastructure.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-looking-move-smokers-toward-e-cigarettes-n787491
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration aims to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes while exploring measures to move smokers toward e-cigarettes, in a major regulatory shift announced on Friday that sent traditional cigarette company stocks plunging. The move means FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has thrown his regulatory weight on the side of those advocating for e-cigarettes in the debate over whether they potentially hold some public health benefits. Shares of major tobacco companies in the United States and UK slumped in heavy trading volume, with the world’s biggest producers poised to lose about sixty billion dollars of market value. The FDA’s move extends the timeline for applications for new e-cigarette clearance by the FDA to August eighth two thousand twenty two, giving e-cigarette companies more time to keep their products on the market before the agency goes into the process of final review. It also gives the FDA more time to set the proper framework for regulating e-cigarettes.
“It’s hard to overstate what this could mean for the companies affected: non-addictive levels of nicotine would likely mean a lot fewer smokers and of those people who do still light up, smoking a lot less,” said Neil Wilson, a senior market analyst with ETX Capital in London.
“This is just the U.S. regulator acting but we can easily see others, particularly in Europe, where regulatory pressures are already extremely high, following suit,” Wilson said.
British American Tobacco shares, trading close to all-time highs, fell as much as eleven percent and were on track for their biggest one-day loss in nearly eighteen years.
Mention menstrual blood in any gathering and watch the topic drive most of the men from the room. A women’s health advocate and entrepreneur wants to change all that and add a potentially powerful new weapon to the fight against disease.
To accomplish her goal, Anna Villarreal created LifeStory Health, a Boston-based company that’s trying to develop the first noninvasive menstrual blood diagnostic test.
“This is kind of my mission,” Villarreal told Healthline. An interviewer at Health Professional Radio introduced Villarreal this way: “By sampling menstrual blood as a means of collecting biologically relevant proteins to test for internal health in a noninvasive manner, she is developing a method and business model that promises to influence women’s healthcare.”
At the moment, medical testing is male-dominated.The science basically assumes that women’s bodies are the same as men’s, except a bit smaller. For example, two-thirds of the five million people currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are women. Moreover, an American woman’s overall lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer’s is almost twice that of a man.
According to Villarreal, “The prevailing thinking in the field is that this is simply because women live longer.” But Alzheimer’s researchers have begun looking past that assumption.
Early discoveries indicate that the impact of hormonal changes at menopause, and sex differences in gene expression, may be involved as well. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, brain studies in men are more frequent than those in women by a ratio of better than five-to-two. According to a study published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, out of nearly two thousand animal studies published in two thousand nine, there was a bias toward the use of male animals in eight out of ten disciplines. Neuroscientists used five point five males for every one female. ….
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