Chiropractic Breakthrough

For the first time since 1987, the number of people in this country with health insurance went down. In 2009, 253.6 million people in this country had coverage compared with 255.1 million the year before, says a report on poverty just out from the U.S. Census Bureau. All told, 50.7 million Americans didn’t have health insurance last year.

Starting this month, all new health care plans must pay for preventive care, including physicals and other wellness programs. The government has set aside $200 million in grant money over five years to help small employers provide programs like smoking cessation, nutrition, physical fitness and stress management. Companies with fewer than 100 employees may apply for grants, which are administered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill asked nutrition educators from more than 100 medical schools to describe the nutrition instruction offered to their students. While the researchers learned that almost all schools require exposure to nutrition, only about a quarter offered the recommended 25 hours of instruction. While a majority of medical schools tend to intersperse lectures on nutrition in standard, required courses, like biochemistry or physiology, only a quarter of the schools managed to have a single course dedicated to the topic.

If the new health care legislation remains intact, it could offer real money for a lot of Americans. Or so says a Families USA report released on Tuesday that estimates that nearly 29 million people will be eligible for tax credits under the law if they are buying private health insurance beginning in 2014. The report calculates that the credits could reduce family income taxes more than $110 billion in 2014 alone.

A federal judge indicated on Tuesday that he would give a green light to a lawsuit filed by elected officials from 20 states who are challenging the constitutionality of the new health care law and its requirement that most individuals obtain medical insurance. Experts on both sides expect the challenges to eventually present the Supreme Court with a landmark opportunity. “Our whole system of federalism rests on the decisions of this case,” said Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, a Republican who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year, according to a study released on Monday. The study, published on the Web site of The Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on 32 medical doctors and doctoral researchers who were each paid at least $1 million in 2007 and published one or more journal articles the next year.

The first real changes to health coverage are scheduled to go into effect next week, Sept. 23 — six months after President Obama signed the law. These include guaranteeing coverage with pre-existing medical conditions, ending lifetime limits and raising annual limits on insurance payments, and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Many Democrats have joined Republicans in pushing for the repeal of a tax provision in the new health care law that imposes a huge information-reporting burden on small businesses. To improve compliance, the law requires businesses to file a 1099 tax form identifying anyone to whom they pay $600 or more for goods or merchandise in a year. Businesses will also have to send copies of the form to their vendors, suppliers and contractors.

While the nation’s economic recovery is slower than expected and overall unemployment is 9.6%, the health care industry is experiencing job growth. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicate that job losses since the downturn (12/07) total 8.4 million; in the same period, health care employment increased 732,000.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2009, 67.5%of adults ate fruit less than two times daily and 73.7% ate vegetables less than three times per day. The goals of Healthy People 2010 were for 75% of people to eat at least two servings of fruit and 50% to eat at least three servings of vegetables every day. The report is published in the Sept. 10 issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.