New York AG Probes Colleges’ Ties to Health Insurers

New York AG Andrew Cuomo has launched a new health-care investigation.
Associated Press
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is wielding a big stick on campus.

This one has to do with colleges’ relationships with health insurers. Looks like he’s checking into whether there’s enough disclosure of policy terms and costs to students, and whether colleges are […]

MRSA, MRSA everywhere. And here comes the Seattle Times with a series on the spread of the nasty infection that’s resistant to many of the most widely used antibiotics.
The Times takes a hard look at Washington hospitals’ failure to contain the deadly antibiotic-resistant germ called MRSA from infecting patients.
After digging through millions of […]

How much does bypass surgery cost? $51,522, if you go to Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. But just a few miles away at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., it would run you $43,857.
Associated Press
Massachusetts General Hospital complex as seen from the John Hancock Tower in Boston.

Need a brain scan? An MRI of your head […]

We are soooo late to this party, but it’s such a delicious one that we just can’t resist a weekend post.
On Wednesday, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, of all people, weighed in with some remarkably trenchant analysis on the results of the Jupiter trial. That’s the study that showed people with normal cholesterol but high […]

Associated Press
A doctor prepares to use Restylane on a patient

An ugly side of the beauty business emerged today, as an FDA briefing listed 930 reports of side effects for injectable wrinkle fillers such as Restylane and Juvederm.
The reports go back to 2003, and include swelling, allergic reactions and infections, among other problems. The briefing says […]

Schering-Plough has kept a promise its CFO made in February of this year: To provide regular reports on how the company’s beleaguered cholesterol franchise is holding up. The latest update, filed with the SEC this morning, shows that the bleeding appears to have stopped, at least for the moment.
The figures at left show combined totals […]

More news today on the Pfizer stem cell initiative we wrote about in September.
It sounds like the effort, to be known as Pfizer Regenerative Medicine, will include a fair bit of deal making — always interesting when you’re talking about a company sitting on billions of dollars in cash. In an announcement today, Pfizer […]

Just as the FDA was announcing a sweeping detention of food products containing milk from China, the Department of Health and Human Services was spinning in a decidedly different direction.
Associated Press
A safety check of milk in China’s Sichuan province.

Around 4 p.m. yesterday, HHS, FDA’s federal parent, sent out an upbeat announcement, headlined: […]

The mainstreaming of medical tourism is about to take another baby step.
Starting in January, a Wisconsin company called Serigraph will waive employees’ copays and coinsurance for certain procedures — provided the employees fly to India for the procedures.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has the story.
For expensive, non-emergency procedures, the math is pretty simple. Knee replacement surgery […]

A modest proposal for paying for primary care in America: A dollar a day.
Getty Images
Here’s an idea: primary care for $1 a day.

It’s fashionable these days to lament the fact that primary care docs make a third as much as some high-paid medical specialists; to try to figure out how to get more young MDs […]