The lede:

Chicago — A panel appointed by President Bush that met here in June appears set to endorse some form of societal obligation to provide health care access to all.

The meeting was part of the President’s Council on Bioethics initiative examining the ethical underpinnings of approaches to reforming the nation’s health system and covering the estimated 47 million uninsured Americans. A report is likely to be issued after the November election.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

The idea of paying physicians more for providing guideline-based care has taken the American health system by storm in the last decade. Today, more than 150 pay-for-performance programs are centered on the notion that rewarding evidence-based care is key to improving health care quality.

But research shows there is a fundamental problem with the P4P programs: They have had little to no impact on quality. That is the conclusion of many studies, including a new analysis of quality incentives, published in the July/August Health Affairs. It compared 81 Massachusetts physician groups eligible for quality incentives with 73 that were not.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

The American Medical Association officially apologized in July for its history of excluding black physicians from membership, for listing black doctors as “colored” in its national physician directory for decades, and for failing to speak against federal funding of segregated hospitals and in favor of civil rights legislation.

“The AMA failed, across the span of a century, to live up to the high standards that define the noble profession of medicine,” said AMA Immediate Past President Ron Davis, MD, in a commentary published in the July 16 Journal of the American Medical Association.

The apology came in response to an AMA-appointed expert panel’s report on the historical racial divide in organized medicine, “African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846-1968: Origins of a Racial Divide,” also published in JAMA.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Starting in January, drug detailers will have a lighter load to carry when they visit physician offices. That is when new industry guidelines take effect that bar them from leaving behind drugmaker-branded pens, notepads, coffee mugs and other reminder items.

The ban, announced July 10, is the biggest change the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America laid out in a revised code on interactions with physicians and other health professionals. The PhRMA code says reminder items “may foster misperceptions that company interactions with health care professionals are not based on informing them about medical and scientific issues.”

The whole shebang.