Group items tagged

SAN FRANCISCO—When Ed Gallagher goes sailing, he wears a webcam on his head, straps a netbook computer to his hip and hops onto a boat with his dog. Then he relies on Herb Meyer, a skipper back on land, to watch the live, streaming webcam video and give him instructions.

The $940 billion health-care overhaul will take nearly a decade to roll out in full. A look at the key parts of the bill and when they go into effect.

After years of debate, a health overhaul is finally becoming a reality. Now what?

Many big provisions don't kick in until 2014, including the mandate for most folks to have health insurance and many new requirements for health-plan designs. Before then, you'll see a mishmash of other things go into effect at various times—and of course some of the changes depend on the Senate passing the House's so-called sidecar, or reconciliation, bill of changes.

Here are some ways you can start dealing with the new health-care landscape.

In his new book “The Panic Virus,” out today, journalist Seth Mnookin digs into the claims about the link between childhood vaccines and autism — and why people believe them. (Here’s a WSJ review of the book.)

Humans are pattern-seeking primates whose brains evolved to look for and find meaningful patterns in the noise and chaos of nature. When we connect A to B, this process is called learning. Sometimes A really is connected to B, and sometimes it is not. The only reliable way to know for sure is via the scientific method. The problem is that our brains were designed millions of years ago, but science is only a few hundred years old. One of the most nefarious anecdotal patterns in recent years has been a seeming connection between autism and vaccines. Parents whose children are diagnosed with autism (A) search for a probable cause; they remember that they had their children vaccinated (B) and forgivably assume that the correlation is causal. These parents worry for their children, enough sometimes to sue the companies that manufacture the vaccines. But collectively they could contribute to a public-health disaster if enough parents were to stop vaccinating their children and communities began to suffer a return of communicable diseases once thought to be routed.

My sixteen-year-old son Haley recently came into my office and announced that he’d finished a six-hundred-page manuscript. I suppose that would be unusual coming from any sixteen-year-old, but given my son’s background, it’s especially stunning. Haley is ADHD and dyslexic. At seven, he hated school. He would hide under the dining room table to avoid reading or doing his homework. My novels about Percy Jackson began as bedtime stories for him – a father’s desperate attempt to keep his son interested in reading. That’s also why I made Percy Jackson ADHD and dyslexic, and made those two conditions indicators of Olympian blood.

oday, Hart continues to challenge status quo assumptions about the frequency of addiction and how drug use affects people. He’s even held Eric Holder to task for calling heroin use in the country “an epidemic.” Instead, Hart argues that the number of true addicts is much smaller, and when addiction does occur, it’s often because of environmental factors, rather than hardwired doom in the brain. His conclusion: Much of what we’ve been taught about drugs is wrong. With more than $40 billion being spent on anti-drug efforts a year, it’s not a message that many people want to hear. But when mass incarceration, often for misdemeanor drug possession charges, affects communities of color so deeply that health studies can’t conduct statistically sound surveys on the population not in prison, it’s a message that could disrupt the social order. We spoke to Hart about how he reached his conclusions and what it takes to speak truth to power in the scientific community.

Some novel programs are addressing a growing gap in health care: helping the millions of survivors of serious childhood diseases find treatment when they grow up. Thanks to medical advances, there are a growing number of survivors of childhood cancers as well as patients living longer with diseases like cystic fibrosis and spina bifida. More children have diseases like diabetes and asthma that will follow them into adulthood. Nearly 25% of children have at least one of a list of 18 chronic conditions, according to federal survey data.