lborkowski | September 5, 2012By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have studied vaccines and vaccine policy for almost forty years, The Pump Handle has invited me to provide its readers with some big-picture background on vaccines and vaccination policy in the US and around the world to accompany the link to my editorial.
School Entry Laws
In the 1970s, public health…
egrossman | September 4, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
We’ve heard repeatedly throughout this political season and throughout this Congress that environmental regulations stifle economic growth and destroy jobs. Yet a new economic analysis shows that in recent years, environmental restoration projects have created significantly more jobs per million dollars of investment than other industries, including coal, gas, and nuclear energy. The study, conducted by Peter Edwards, a natural resource economist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and colleagues, examined job creation resulting from American…
lborkowski | September 4, 2012In honor of (US) Labor Day, Celeste Monforton and I have started what we intend to be a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012 is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each…
lborkowski | August 31, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's Tuesday evening and as usual, the small parking lot outside the Workers Defense Project on Austin's eastside is packed. The dusty lot is strewn with cars and pick-up trucks parked wherever they can fit and get in off the road. I've arrived well before the night's activities begin, so I easily secure a spot. But my gracious guide and translator, a college intern named Alan Garcia, warns me that I might get blocked in. It happens all the time, he says.
It was the first of two August evenings I'd spend observing the project in action and meeting the workers who help lead its…
lborkowski | August 30, 2012A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: The 'NIH Superbug': This is Happening Every Day
Kevin O'Hanlon at the Center for Public Integrity: Privatization fails: Nebraska tries again to reform child welfare
Tara C. Smith at Aetiology: Obstetric fistula as a neglected tropical disease
Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein at Wonkblog: The true, the false, and the misleading: Grading Paul Ryan's convention speech and A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign
Abby Goodnough in the New York Times: Sharp Cuts in Dental Coverage for Adults on Medicaid
lborkowski | August 29, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
What industry employs approximately 20 million Americans, or one out of five US private-sector workers, but whose median wage has workers taking home less than $20,000 a year? Clue: It’s the same industry in which it’s actually legal to pay $2.13 an hour, for workers who qualify as “tipped” employees. Answer: The food service industry, which includes agricultural and farmworkers, food processing and slaughterhouse employees, as well as those working in food distribution, retail, restaurants, and other food service businesses.
In a survey for a report released earlier…
cmonforton | August 28, 2012I'll be the first to admit I've criticized the Obama Administration's OSHA for failing to issue or even propose many new worker safety and health standards. As I wrote earlier this month, under President Obama and Secretary Solis, OSHA has only issued three new worker safety rules, two of which were safety standards affecting discrete industries and the third, a rule broadly endorsed by big business. Some colleagues and commentators attribute this mediocre record to regulatory resistance in the White House, pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, too few staff in the OSHA standards…
'An issue that affects all of us': Young workers center takes on wage theft in the Rio Grande Valley
lborkowski | August 27, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For six months, Jorge Rubio worked at a local chain of tortilla bakeries and taquerias in the cities of Brownsville and San Benito, both in the very southern tip of Texas. Rubio, 42, prepared the food, cleaned equipment, served customers. Eventually, he decided to quit after being overworked for months.
On his last day of work this past January, his employer refused to pay him the usual $50 for an 11-hour workday. The employer told Rubio that sales were too low to pay him. A couple months later, Rubio was referred to Fuerza del Valle, a young workers center in Texas' Rio…
lborkowski | August 24, 2012The extent to which the Affordable Care Act succeeds in making affordable health insurance more widely available depends to a great degree on the success of the state-based health insurance exchanges that are currently being developed. A piece by Ewout van Ginneken and Katherine Schwartz in the latest New England Journal of Medicine offers some advice and cautions about the exchanges, based on the experiences of the Netherlands and Switzerland. Both those countries rely extensively on private insurers plus substantial government involvement.
Risk adjustment is one key to exchanges' success.…
lborkowski | August 23, 2012North Carolina's News & Observer has published a terrific in-depth series on “ghost policies” – inadequate workers’ compensation policies that save employers money but leave injured workers without the safety net they’re supposed to have. North Carolina requires employers with three or more employees to have workers’ compensation coverage, and general contractors often require coverage even for smaller firms. But a News & Observer investigation found that more than 30,000 businesses in the state lack the required coverage. Mandy Locke writes about one injured worker whose employer’s…
cmonforton | August 22, 2012As first reported yesterday by Chris Hamby at the Center for Public Integrity's IWatch, an internal report on the agency's Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), submitted in November 2011 to OSHA chief David Michaels is now public.
Over the months, I'd made my own inquiries to OSHA's public affairs office wondering when the public might be able to read this report. I never received a response, but understand it appeared on OSHA's website on Friday, August 17. Thanks to Hamby for bringing it to our attention.
OSHA's VPP dates back to 1983, and recognizes worksites that, in OSHA's words "…
lborkowski | August 21, 2012by Beth Spence
Last week a friend and I visited the memorial dedicated to the miners who were killed in the 2010 Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster. The massive 48-foot granite structure with 29 ghostly silhouettes is a powerful tribute to the lost miners and to the industry that has been so dominant in the Appalachian region.
It is fitting that the memorial is in Whitesville, nestled in the Coal River Valley not far from where coal was first discovered in West Virginia, and that it stands on the very site where, in the days and weeks after the disaster, an organic memorial sprang up to…
lborkowski | August 20, 2012Recent investigative reports in the New York Times and Washington Post delve into some of the profit-maximizing practices among healthcare providers that are can put patients' lives at risk. Polls have found that people have high levels of trust in their doctors, but these pieces show how financial pressures and incentives can lead to decisions that aren't in patients' best interests.
Last week, Julie Creswell and Reed Abelson reported in the New York Times on hospital giant HCA, which was bought by private equity firms (including Bain Capital) in 2006 and has since generated impressive…
lborkowski | August 17, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He'd heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use.
Then in 2000, the New Jersey resident enrolled in a California program studying the effects of medical marijuana. It was a blind study, so Rosenfeld didn't know whether he was one of the participants being given marijuana or not. It turns out he was. And it worked.
"Marijuana was the first effective treatment that I had…
lborkowski | August 16, 2012We've written recently about two bills that had been passed by US and Massachusetts legislatures but not yet signed, so I wanted to close the loop and report that both are now law.
On August 6, President Obama signed into law the "Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012," which, among other things, provides that the Department of Veterans Affairs will give hospital care and medical services to veterans and their families who were exposed to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, from 1957 to 1987, and have developed conditions associated with TCE, PCE,…
lborkowski | August 16, 2012A new Health Wonk Review compiled by Jaan Sidorov is now up at Disease Management Care Blog. It's got links and descriptions for a bounty of blog posts on healthcare quality, the Affordable Care Act, Paul Ryan, and other healthcare topics (including a link to my recent post on where Medicaid beneficiaries can get care).
One of the featured posts I particularly like (and probably wouldn't have seen if not for the HWR link) is Justin Jones' "A farewell, a remembrance, and a request" at The New Health Dialogue. Jones, who has just started his second year of medical school, reflects on his great-…
cmonforton | August 15, 2012[Udated below (Sept 5, 2013)]
Jay Van Buskirk, 47, was employed less than a year at the ConAgra Foods flour mill in Alton, Illinois, before falling to his death on August 4, 2012. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
"Van Buskirk was standing on a man lift platform and moving between the fourth and fifth floors of the nine-story flour mill when he fell. The Madison County Coroner's Office reported that the death was due to head trauma and that the fall was as much as 74 feet. According to the coroner's office, the man had complained of feeling dizzy prior to the fall."
A week earlier it was…
cmonforton | August 14, 2012In a New York Times story reporting on the resignation of Cass Sunstein, President Obama's director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the paper missed an opportunity to take readers beyond the rhetoric to reality. One sentence in the article said this:
"Business lobbies and Republicans in Congress complain frequently about 'job-killing' regulations, citing rules like the E.P.A.’s new standard for carbon emissions from power plants (recently upheld by a federal appeals court) and the Department of Labor’s new worker-safety rules."
"What Department of Labor's new…
lborkowski | August 13, 2012Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) as his running mate this past weekend has provided plenty of fodder for discussions about the role of the US government. Unlike Romney, who has often declined to provide specifics about policies he’d pursue as president, Ryan has been very clear about what he thinks the government should do. As chair of the House Budget Committee, Ryan authored the “Path to Prosperity” budget proposal that the House passed earlier this year.
The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza describe Ryan's evolution as a…
lborkowski | August 10, 2012In order to meet the healthcare needs of populations at the local, national, and global levels, we're going to need to think carefully about which providers can do which kinds of tasks. Pieces in Washington Post and New York Times blogs this week highlight projects that reconsider what kinds of providers patients need to see to get care for particular conditions.
In the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff describes efforts by Albuquerque physician Sanjeev Arora to make Hepatitis C treatment available to patients across New Mexico. Arora is one of a small number of Hepatitis C specialists…