Hong Kong
RIDDING the world of polio is proving to be an elusive goal. And a key problem may well be that organizers of the global anti-polio initiative, and of other global health programs, are not listening to the people they want to help — or to each other.
As a result, in many communities targeted by the programs, people perceive a gulf between global programs like polio eradication and more immediate local health needs.
As one man in Northern Nigeria asked me, “Why polio, polio, polio, when we cannot get a health clinic near our village?”
In fact, in the parts of Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan where polio survives, the disease is not a major health issue. Malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea are the major killers of children under five, and they dwarf polio as a subject of concern for parents.
But it is polio that tends to get the attention and the resources. Polio teams come knocking at the doors of homes with free vaccine, while treatment for other, more urgent diseases need to be paid for. This leads to suspiciousness among parents, and eradication program workers struggle to get them to vaccinate their children

Hospices trying to sell the public on their care

People often have one regret about hospice care: that they didn’t get it sooner.
The hospice system has been caring for terminally ill patients and their families for decades; 42 percent of the 2.4 million Americans who died last year were under hospice care at the end.
Now, hospices across the country are trying to rebrand and reposition themselves to reach patients earlier and erase the idea that turning to hospice is akin to “giving up.”
“It’s not about death and dying, but it’s about improving quality of living, not just for the patient but for the entire family,” said Mark M Murray, president and chief executive of the Center for Hospice Care, which serves Northern Indiana.
Hospice care, offered in the patient’s home, nursing home, or specialized facility, is available to anyone determined by a doctor to be within six months of death. Medicare and insurance usually cover the cost.

Insurers warned on costs by state

By Chelsea Conaboy

Leaders of the Group Insurance Commission, which administers health benefits for the families of state employees and retirees, have drawn a line in the sand.
Insurers who want to offer plans starting in April to the nearly 400,000 people the commission serves must agree to lower costs of coverage — and save the state money — in the last years of a five-year contract.
“I do not mean increases that are lower than they might otherwise have been,” said Dolores Mitchell, executive director, speaking at the annual conference of the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans. “ ‘It could have been worse,’ is not what we have in mind. I mean lower total dollars spent.”






Togetherness can elude seniors

The closing of an assisted-living center in Scarborough separates one couple after 52 years of marriage

By Gillian Graham ggraham@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer
SCARBOROUGH - Doris Seekamp never imagined she and her husband of 52 years would spend their later years living apart.
She hasn't laid eyes on her husband, Henry, in the month since he moved out of the Pine Point Center in Scarborough and into Portland Center for Assisted Living. They talk on the phone nearly every day, but it's not the same as sharing meals, playing cards and awaiting together the arrival of their first grandchild.
After the Pine Point Center announced in September it would close its assisted-living unit to make more room for a short-stay program, nine residents had to move to other facilities. Henry Seekamp was able to find a home in Portland, but his wife, who had been staying in a special-care unit following surgery, wasn't quite ready to move back into assisted living and stayed behind in Scarborough.