HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: William C. Weldon, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, is expected to acknowledge to lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Thursday that the company mishandled the removal of certain medicines from store shelves last year. He also planned to announce that after a recall of children’s liquid medicines, new batches would begin to reach stores as early as next week.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: Economists at George Washington University have tabulated the cost of obesity and discovered a surprising gender gap: It’s more expensive for a woman to be obese than for a man. While a man racks up $2,646 annually in extra expenses if he is obese, a woman’s obesity costs her $4,879, almost twice as much. Much of the gender gap is due to lower wages for obese women, who earn less relative to similar working women who are not obese. The study also found that the more overweight you are, the more expensive life gets. The incremental costs faced by obese women are nine times higher than those for overweight women. For obese men, the costs are six times higher than those of overweight men.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a comprehensive nationwide behavioral study of fruit and vegetable consumption. Only 26% of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, it concluded. The number of dinners prepared at home that included a salad was 17%; in 1994, it was 22%.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: Last Thursday marked six months since the health care bill became law. The law is not perfect, but the difference it is making in the lives of people who have been denied insurance due to a pre-existing condition and seniors struggling with prescription drug costs is significant. No one should lose their health care just because they get sick, or be forced to pay all their medical costs out of pocket because they have hit a “lifetime cap,” and this legislation ends these practices.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: About 16.6 million workers are employed by small businesses that are eligible for health insurance tax credits under the new health care law. However, a report by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that only 3.4 million of those workers are at firms that would take advantage of the tax credit. For the most part, those are firms that already offer their employees health insurance. Those firms that do not offer coverage are unlikely to consider the tax breaks enough of a financial incentive to start doing so, according to the report's authors.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: For young Americans with no health insurance, Thursday was an important day: those younger than 26 were able to join their parents’ plans under the recently enacted health care overhaul. Previously, children were dropped from their parents’ policies what 19 or 23 if they were full time students. Young people make up the largest group of uninsured Americans, although they are healthier and cheaper to insure. And they are much less likely to vote.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: For many families, health care relief begins today. Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits. The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies. It establishes a menu of preventive procedures that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: The Obama administration announced Tuesday that average premiums for private Medicare Advantage plans, which insure about 1/4 of all beneficiaries, will decline slightly next year, even as insurers provide additional benefits required by the new health care law. By contrast, commercial insurance premiums for many people under 65 and many small businesses are increasing 10%-25% or more.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: Republicans, hopeful of picking up substantial numbers of seats in the Congressional elections, are developing plans to try to repeal or roll back the new health care law. Republicans say they will try to withhold money that federal officials need to administer and enforce the law and are expected to include specifics in an election agenda they intend to issue Thursday.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: Starting this week you could see significant changes to your health insurance coverage. This is due to health care reform. It will impact thousands of people including companies and how they pay for benefits and what you ultimately pay for health insurance. Effective this week, insurance companies cannot put a dollar limit on benefits such as hospital or lab services and coverage for dependents is going up to 26 years of age. Also you'll get preventative care without a deductable or co-pay.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: 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.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: A new government study says President Obama’s health care law will have negligible effects on total national health spending in the next 10 years, neither slowing nor fueling the explosive growth of medical costs. About 32.5 million people will gain coverage, and health spending will grow slightly faster than projected under prior law — at an annual rate of 6.3%, rather than 6.1%, the report said.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: In a snapshot of systemic waste, researchers have calculated that more than half of the 354 million doctor visits made each year for acute medical care, like for fevers, stomachaches and coughs, are not with a patient’s primary physician, and that more than a quarter take place in hospital emergency rooms. The authors of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, said it highlighted a significant question about the new federal health care law: can access to primary care be maintained, much less improved, when an already inadequate and inefficient system takes on an expected 32 million newly insured customers?

HC Reform Update by Mark Sanna: On average, the total cost of a family health insurance policy rose just 3 percent last year, to $13,770 in annual premiums, according to a survey of employer health benefits released on Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group. As a result, the employee contribution toward family coverage rose an average of 14 percent, or almost $500, from what employees paid last year.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: The specialty pharmaceutical company Allergan has agreed to pay $600 million to settle civil and criminal accusations that it illegally marketed Botox, the drug used in antiwrinkle injections, for medical uses for which the drug had not been approved. Allergan, based in Irvine, Calif., also agreed to pay $225 million to resolve civil charges that it had caused false claims to be submitted to Medicare and Medicaid. “The significance of the case is that Allergan promoted Botox for off-label uses, uses that were not approved by the F.D.A. as being safe and effective,” said Marcella Auerbach, a lawyer representing two whistle-blowers in the case.

HC Reform Update from Mark Sanna: Even as Congress moves to expand health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, it's doing little to ensure there will be enough primary care doctors to meet the expected surge in demand for treatment, experts say. The American Academy of Family Physicians predicts that the shortage of family doctors will reach 40,000 in the next 10 years, as medical schools send about half the needed number of graduates into primary care medicine. The overall shortage of doctors is expected to grow to nearly 160,000 by 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.