Panel Says U.S. Should Weigh Cost in Deciding ‘Essential Health Benefits’
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences said Thursday that the federal government should explicitly consider cost as a factor in deciding what health benefits must be provided by insurance plans under President Obama’s health care overhaul, and it said the cost of any new benefits should be “offset by savings” elsewhere in the health care system.
Moreover, it said, in defining “essential health benefits,” the government should try to guarantee that the average premium would not exceed benchmarks that would be set by the secretary of health and human services.
In a new report, the academy’s Institute of Medicine does not list specific services that should be covered. Rather, it tells the secretary of health and human services how to define the minimum benefits. That is a huge decision that could affect 68 million people, including individuals, families and businesses that obtain coverage through new state-based insurance exchanges.
Panel’s Advice on Prostate Test Sets Up Battle
By GARDINER HARRIS
A day after a government panel said that healthy men should no longer get screened for prostate cancer, some doctors’ groups and cancer patients’ advocates began a campaign to convince the nation that the advice was misguided.
Their hope is to copy the success of women’s groups that successfully persuaded much of the country two years ago that it was a mistake for the same panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, to recommend against routine mammograms for women in their 40s. This time, the task force found that a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer does not save lives, but results in needless medical procedures that have left tens of thousands of men impotent, incontinent or both.
Insurers Review Whether to Still Pay for Routine Screening
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Insurers and clinicians scrambled on Friday to decide whether to continue to offer routine P.S.A. tests following news that an influential panel of experts no longer recommended them for healthy men.
Some insurers said they intended to continue paying for the test, while others said they would revisit their policies.
Obama, the loner president
By Scott Wilson,
Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: people.This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.
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