The League of Iowa
Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Deciding on Care for Elderly Parents in Declining Health

By Lesley Alderman

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

TWO years ago my father, then 83, became very ill. Until then, he had been living alone in a pleasant one-bedroom apartment on the Hudson River, an hour’s drive from my home in Brooklyn. After a couple of months i...

3 Ruling Find No Link to Vaccines and Autism

By Donald G. McNeils, Jr.

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

In a further blow to the antivaccine movement, three judges ruled Friday in three separate cases that thimerosal, a mercury preservative, does not cause autism. The three rulings are the second step in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding ...

Student loan overhaul seems likely to join Senate health-care bill

By Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, March 11, 2010; 4:49 PM

Senate Democrats said Thursday that they are inclined to add an overhaul of the nation's student loan program to the final health-c...

Speed Reading of DNA May Help Cancer Treatment

By Nicholas Wade

Published: March 8, 2010, New York Times

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a way to monitor the progress of a patient’s cancer treatment using a new technique for rapidly sequencing, or decoding, large amounts of DNA. In the proces...

Better health doesn’t seem to explain why so many young people forgo health insurance. Rather, income does, according to new survey data released by Gallup. First, some background. One of the explanations for rising health care costs is that relatively healthy people are taking their chances and going without insurance. The relatively sick pool of insured customers who remain drive up the cost of premiums, at least if there is any form of risk-sharing (like community rating) within that...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Higher Medicare copays, sometimes just a few dollars more, led to fewer doctors visits and to more and longer hospital stays, a large new study reveals. With health care costs skyrocketing, many public and private insurers have required patients to pay more out-of-pocket when they seek care. The new study confirms what many policymakers had feared: cost-shifting moves can backfire.

T.J. Utterback started out as a military police officer before a stint as a National Park ranger. The past 25 years, he's worked in the nursing field at Mercy Medical Center - first as a flight nurse and more recently as a house supervisor overseeing night shift operations at the main campus, Mercy Franklin Center and when needed, Mercy West Lakes. He also taps his skills in law enforcement and nursing in his role as a medical examiner investigator for Warren County.

WHEN Jeff Sell’s twin sons were found to have autism 13 years ago, he, like so many other parents in the same situation, found himself with a million questions: Will my children be able to function? What are the best treatments and where do I find them? How will this affect the rest of my family? And besides those monumental worries, Mr. Sell kept asking himself another fundamental question as he began the long string of doctor and therapist visits with his sons: “How in the world...

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalizat...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Further cuts to Oklahoma's mental health budget would be a false economy because the responsibility - and cost - of caring for those who need treatment would simply pass to other state and local agencies, the mental health commissioner warned Wednesday. Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Commissioner Terri White said her agency has already cut $16 million from its budget and that additional cuts will force it to reduce programs and turn away some of the ...