By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Pieces of the health care portion of the Obama budget are leaking out. Based upon published reports, the Obama “down payment on health care reform” will include: $634 billion to help pay for health care reform over…

By Robert Wachter, MD Thanks to White House budget director Peter Orszag, a Dartmouth Atlas aficionado, $1.1 billion found its way into the stimulus piñata for “comparative effectiveness” research. Terrific, but – to paraphrase Jack Nicholson – can we handle…

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI The President has made a powerful argument— America cannot get its economic house under control without comprehensive health care reform. The cost of existing entitlements – public and private —and any new ones are just too big…

By JOHN HALAMKA This Thursday I gave a presentation to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) about measuring quality using “traditional” and emerging, novel sources of healthcare data. My definition of traditional data sources that are currently…

Scientists from the US and Australia are using cells from yeast and mammals to learn about how environment and genes affect whether a person gets Parkinson’s disease or not.

Helen Darling of the National Business Group on Health wrote in to comment on the thread on Robert Laszewski’s post on the realities behind the Obama health plan. (”For the Obama administration health care reform will require cost containment.”) We…

Researchers in the US studying mice with and without amyloid-beta plaques in their brains (the plaques that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease) found that contrary to current thinking, the plaques don’t just damage the neurons they are close to but may well affect signalling in other parts of the brain through their influence on extensive networks of astrocyte brain cells.