HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The 2010 health care overhaul law has provoked an unprecedented clash between the federal government and 26 states, dividing them on fundamental questions about the very structure of the federal system. But the two sides share a surprising amount of common ground, too, starting with their agreement in briefs, filed on Wednesday, that the Supreme Court should resolve the clash in its current term.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The Obama administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear a case concerning the 2010 health care law. The development, which came unexpectedly fast, makes it all but certain that the court will soon agree to hear one or more cases involving challenges to the law, with arguments by the spring and a decision by June, in time to land in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The Obama administration must decide today whether to ask the full U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a 2-1 August decision declaring unconstitutional the health law's individual mandate. If it does seek the full court's review, which could take weeks or months, it will likely push back a Supreme Court ruling until 2013.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Data released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that in the first quarter of 2011, the percentage of adults between ages 19 and 25 without health insurance fell 3.5 percentage points — to 30.4%. That translates to about an additional 1 million people that got coverage from the previous year. It's the third survey in recent weeks to credit a piece of the health law with giving more young adults insurance.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum have donated $42 million to the University of Chicago Medical Center to create an institute devoted to improving medical students’ handling of the doctor-patient relationship. The Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence, to be announced today, will be led by Dr. Mark Siegler, a doctor the couple found compassionate and humble. “To care for a patient,” Dr. Siegler said, “you have to care about a patient.”

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare have agreed to provide their claims data to a new nonprofit research initiative called the Health Care Cost Institute. The institute will have more than 5 billion medical claim records representing more than $1 trillion of health care spending in private plans and Medicare Advantage plans. The researchers’ are salivating because the patterns of medical care for people with private insurance — two thirds of the covered population — mostly remain a mystery, even as health care costs threaten to bankrupt the nation.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: President Obama’s budget director said Monday that the president’s new deficit-reduction plan would impose “a lot of pain,” and that is clearly true of White House proposals to cut $320 billion from projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid in the coming decade. A large share of the Medicare savings would be used to pay doctors, who would otherwise face deep cuts in the fees they receive for treating Medicare patients.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Obama's debt reduction proposal, which is scheduled for release today, will include $320 billion in health care savings, but it will not raise Medicare's eligibility age. Half of its savings result from new tax revenue. President Obama is also sending a warning to congressional Republicans: If they send him a bill that cuts programs for poor and elderly Americans but doesn't impose sacrifice on corporations or ask others to sacrifice, he will veto it.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers. He is expected to call for $300 billion in savings from changes to Medicare and Medicaid as a way of reducing the deficit.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Three journalism organizations on Thursday protested a decision by the Obama administration to remove a database of physician discipline and malpractice actions from the Web. The National Practitioner Data Bank, created in 1986, is used by state medical boards, insurers and hospitals. The “public use file” of the data bank, with physician names and addresses deleted, has provided valuable information for many years to researchers and reporters investigating oversight of doctors, trends in disciplinary actions and malpractice awards.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: In the latest advance for health care accountability, the country’s leading hospital accreditation board, the Joint Commission, released a list on Tuesday of 405 medical centers that have been the most diligent in following protocols to treat conditions like heart attack and pneumonia. None of the 17 medical centers listed by U.S. News & World Report on its “Best Hospitals Honor Roll” this year are on the list.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers. A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000 — adding codes that describe precisely what bone was broken, or which artery is receiving a stent. The system, known as ICD-10, will provide a more exact accounting of diagnoses and inpatient procedures, which could improve payment strategies and care guidelines.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Americans seem to be paying the price for the unrelenting rise in health care costs in this country, according to several studies being published last week in Health Affairs, an academic journal. The higher cost of coverage has taken a huge cut in the increase in income earned by the average family, says one study, and lower-income families are particularly hard hit, according to another. Meanwhile, the numbers of people who cannot afford insurance or do not have enough coverage have significantly increased, according to a third study.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: A federal appellate court in Richmond, Va., on Thursday threw out a pair of cases challenging the constitutionality of President Obama’s 2010 health care law, ruling for varying reasons that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to sue. Still other cases continue to progress through the appellate process. The Supreme Court has yet to signal whether it will accept one or more of the cases.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Doctors are paid higher fees in the United States than in several other countries, and this is a major factor in the nation’s higher overall cost of health care, says a new study by two Columbia University professors, one of whom is now a top health official in the Obama administration. “U.S. primary care physicians earn about 1/2 more than do their counterparts elsewhere because a much larger share of their incomes is derived from private insurance,” the study said.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Fewer adults in the United States are smoking and those who do are smoking fewer cigarettes each day, but the trend is weaker than the government had hoped. A report released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 19.3% of adults said they smoked last year, down from about 21% in 2005. The rate for smoking 30 or more cigarettes daily dropped to about 8% from almost 13% over the same period.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Starting this past Thursday, insurers that propose to increase their rates by 10% or more must submit their request to state or federal reviewers, who will determine if those hikes are reasonable, according to HHS. As part of this process, independent experts will study information about underlying costs trends in health care and will indicate when insurance companies raise their costs unjustly.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Signaling its commitment to tackling the social issues that affect childhood obesity, the White House announced on Friday that Dr. Judith S. Palfrey will head Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to fight childhood obesity. A pediatrician for more than 30 years, Dr. Palfrey recently served as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and director of the Children’s Hospital of Boston’s global health efforts.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: After the collapse of negotiations between Atlanta’s public hospital, Grady Memorial, and the world’s largest dialysis provider, a dozen immigrants suffering from renal failure were refused treatment at an Atlanta clinic, operated by Fresenius Medical Care North America, on Thursday and advised to wait until their conditions deteriorated enough to justify life-saving care in an emergency room.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The results of an analysis performed by researchers in Ontario on 30,000-year-old bacteria whose DNA has been recovered from the Yukon permafrost shows that they were able to resist antibiotics. Experts had long predicted this on theoretical grounds, but they say the new finding underlines the need to use antibiotics sparingly, given that the genes for antibiotic resistance are ubiquitous and can easily be promoted by antibiotics.