Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday that more than 1,100 health centers in all 50 states will share $150 million in grants for outreach. It's the largest pot of federal money for in-person enrollment assistance.

For first time readers, homeopathy is based on several fictions, totally divorced from reality, made up in the 1800′s. The first law . . . is, "similia similibus curentur," or "let like be cured by like." Substances which cause specific symptoms can be used to cure diseases which cause the same symptoms. . . . Say you have a headache. What causes a headache? Being smacked on the head by a hammer. So in homeopathic thinking, being hit on the head with a hammer would cure your headache.

"Because rare but potentially serious adverse events of prescription drugs are often discovered only after market approval, observational postmarketing studies constitute an important part of the U.S. drug safety system," write Kevin Fain, J.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and colleagues.

Imagine a world where everybody took their medicines and doctors prescribed only generic medications (when available)? According to a report by CVS Caremark, America would save billions of dollars every year.

The participants were less likely to endorse the "stick" plans because they were perceived as a punishment for being overweight. However, they did not seem to distinguish between the three "stick" plans, in spite of a $100 difference in premiums. Rather, they appeared to evaluate the plans on moral grounds.

"The United States spends more than the rest of the world on health care and leads the world in the quality and quantity of its health research, but that doesn't add up to better health outcomes," said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME Director and one of the lead authors on the study. "The country has done a good job of preventing premature deaths from stroke, but when it comes to lung cancer, preterm birth complications, and a range of other causes, the country isn't keeping pace with high-income countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere."

Ironically, licensing statutes are enacted based on the states' constitutional power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. Yet these CAM practice acts actually increase public vulnerability to unsafe and ineffective health care practices.... 1. Practice acts grant CAM practitioners a broad scope of practice, including legalization of scientifically implausible and unproven (or disproven) diagnostic methods, diagnoses and treatments.

The first issue is available for free on ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22130764

Researchers created clinical scenarios related to four common pitfalls of EDIS use in emergency departments: communication failure, poor data display, wrong order/wrong patient errors and alert fatigue.

Offit gives Vioxx as a case in point. Vioxx, approved in 1999, was a huge hit for treating arthritis pain. It's a more refined version of the drugs in the same class as aspirin and ibuprofen, without causing the stomach bleeding that can make them dangerous. Tests showed it could raise the risk of heart attacks and Vioxx's maker pulled it off the market. "So which is more dangerous: Vioxx or vitamins? Indeed, both have dangers," Offit writes. "The better question is, why does everybody know that Vioxx can cause heart disease and nobody knows that megavitamins can cause cancer? The answer is that we have chosen not to know."

Along with other walk-in retail clinic chains such as Kroger's Little Clinic and Walgreen's Take Care Health, MinuteClinic is gearing up for an anticipated swell of newly insured people come Jan. 1, 2014, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.

The American healthcare system overspends by $200 billion, 8% of its healthcare budget, because medications are not being used responsibly by doctors and patients every year, says a new report issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Mobile health technology has substantial potential for improving access to health care in the developing world and in remote regions of developed countries, states an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Currently, readmissions for Medicare patients alone cost $26 billion annually. About $17 billion of that could be avoided if patients received the right care from the start, according to a February 2013 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began cutting one percent of reimbursements for 30-day readmissions among Medicare patients. That penalty is expected to increase to two percent in 2014 and three percent in 2015.

While there exist numerous published studies purporting to demonstrate positive results from DAT [dolphin-assisted therapy], none so far has controlled for feel-good and placebo effects. Most don't even include a minimal control group, which would provide some measure of whether even general short-term feel-good effects are due to the dolphin or to other salient factors, such as being in the water, being given conventional tasks, getting increased attention from others, and so forth.