CMA Press Clips
Daily  reports on health care policy and medicine from newspapers and magazines throughout California and around the nation.

Health group wants to snuff tobacco in pharmacies
Stockton Record – 7/19/10 – It's impossible to miss. It stands just inside the front door, right behind the cashier. It's a colorful wall of cigarettes, nine shelves high and 10 feet wide, placed strategically so that customers stare directly at it when they make their purchases.

Doctors among those arrested in $251M Medicare scams
USA Today – 7/19/10 -- Federal authorities said Friday they are conducting the largest Medicare fraud bust ever in five different states and arrested dozens of suspects accused in scams totaling $251 million.

Parents, doctors often under treat children for pain
USA Today – 7/19/10 – Parents have always nursed their kids through illness and patched up bumps and bruises. But today, with hospitals sending most kids home within hours of surgery, parents are also being asked to oversee their children's recoveries and pain management.

Insurers Push Plans That Limit Choice of Doctor
New York Times – 7/17/10 – As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.

Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax
New York Times – 7/17/10 – When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

AIDS study: Treatment lowers infection risk
SF Chronicle – 7/19/10 – Provocative new research shows that treating people with the AIDS virus can provide a powerful bonus: It cuts the risk that they will infect others.

In US cities, HIV linked more to poverty than race
Associated Press – 7/19/10 – Poverty is perhaps the most important factor in whether inner-city heterosexuals are infected with the AIDS virus, according to the first government study of its kind.

Grossman relocating to new facility at West Hills Hospital
Los Angeles Daily News – 7/17/10 – It is a momentous move across the San Fernando Valley by the world-renowned burn treatment center. But when the doors open today at The Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center, not a single stethoscope will have made the trip.

Opinion: Burnout hurts doctors as well as their patients
USA Today – 7/19/10 – A new patient recently said he was referred to me after his last doctor had left medicine. His old doctor always looked unhappy and burned out, he noted. Burnout affects more than half of doctors, according to researchers at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

Opinion: Vaccine sense
The Press-Enterprise – 7/19/10 – California's outbreak of whooping cough serves as a grim reminder that preventative medicine counts. Slackness about vaccinations can abet an epidemic that is largely preventable. Parents and others who want to avoid the potentially deadly consequences of whooping cough should make sure vaccinations are current.