Politics

Massachusetts is looking at changing its health care payment system and the rest of the nation is watching, considering following suit. In this new system, instead of insurance companies paying for each procedure a patient has, they will instead have a total allowance for each patient. When that person's limit is hit, insurance will no longer provide coverage.

The insurance commission that developed this framework has yet to determine how the limits will be set. This article mentions different coverage for those with certain illnesses, but that still leaves the question of who will set the limits and which illness will fall into which categories. For those who fall into the "healthy" category, this should have little impact. For those of us with illnesses, however, we must now wonder if fewer tests will be covered, and whether we will still get a full year's coverage of expensive drugs, etc.

[Thanks to Julie M. for contributing this story!]

It had seemed, momentarily, that the new administration was going to reverse the position of the Bush administration on the use of stem cells in federally funded research. Stem cells hold great promise for the treatment of many diseases, including MS.

Now it seems that politics means more than cures to our new president.

The National Institutes of Health recently issued draft guidelines creating a framework for federal funding of embyonic stem cell research pursuant to the President's Executive Order. The public has until May 26th to comment on these guidelines. NIH will be analyzing both the content and volume of comments they receive during this period as they consider changes to the draft.

The subject says it all, but you can read it in the news. Biogen Idec launched online ads touting Tysabri and failing to mention things like, well you know, fatal brain diseases and such.

The FDA sent them a "that's a no-no" letter. Too bad there are still hundreds of sites selling "MS Cures" that the FDA does nothing about at all.

The insane politics of the previous administration surrounding the use of stem cells in research has been reversed.

Let's get cracking on figuring out how to shepherd those stem cells into brain cells!

That site has a lot of good info on stem cells in general, so you might want to click around in there a bit.

Apparently some big publishers are trying to push through some legislation that would take away the public's free access to PubMed, the online research database that MSNews is driven by and most researchers use to find out what's happening in their field.

Quite bogus. And MIT researchers think so too. Although their "all papers will be made open access (unless the researcher opts out)" is a good step in the right direction, the opt-out clause makes it sub-optimal.

Please note the levels of funding expected for MS research in the future. Do you agree that we should be pushing congress, president, etc. to increase the amounts for research as much as possible?

art: I'll take this posting as another opportunity to present my case that we should not just assume that more funding equals better results. I wrote up my thoughts on this a while back, you can read them here.

In this article on Michelle Obama it mentions that her father had MS. I did not know that.

Perhaps, if she become first lady, she'll be more active with regard to MS than the Romneys were in the Governer's seat in MA...

No country has figured out a healthcare system that works for everyone (or even most people). The US system is seriously broken and detractors are usually proponents of some form of national health system.

Here's a story from the UK about the poor treatment you get from NHS when you have MS and the failure of a five year effort to fix that.

Here's a health plan that works: get really rich and be able to afford the best doctors and hospitals. Now we just need a plan to get really rich.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration revised its consumer advice on mercury amalgam fillings in the wake of a settlement in a lawsuit by Moms Against Mercury and other nonprofits against the federal agency.

The FDA Web site now says mercury amalgams "may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses." The agency also reopened the comment period until July 28 on a rule designating mercury amalgam as a Class II device with special controls on its use.

Special bonus: the link points to the story being reported in the *Mercury* News :-)