Healthcare Thursday

The well is capped, but would you eat the scallops? There's some action on Capitol Hill Thursday, as members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment take a break from their summer break to examine the safety of the seafood coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. 

The White House has said repeatedly that the seafood is fine to eat, with President Obama celebrating his own birthday earlier this month with a barbecue on the White House lawn featuring Gulf shrimp. But others aren't so sure. 

A coalition of scientists and Gulf activists — uniting as the Gulf Coast Fund — is claiming that the government is undercounting the barrels of oil left to be dealt with following the BP spill. 

"Just because the oil is no longer on the surface, it does not indicate that the area is healthy," Wilma Subra, a microbiologist advising the fund said recently.

On top of that, local fishermen are questioning the legitimacy of the smell tests the government has used to test for chemicals. (No, literally.) http://bit.ly/aSPmnD

The administration will have plenty of opportunity to make its case. Appearing before the House panel Thursday will be representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The hearing is timely: Louisiana launched its shrimp season earlier in the week. http://bit.ly/bRNHDj

Part D premiums to rise, but not by much. Seniors enrolled in Medicare's prescription drug benefit will see their premiums rise about $1 next year, to $30 per month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Wednesday. The program, launched in 2006, caters to more than 27 million seniors. http://bit.ly/91gmDz

Who said death panel? Contrary to Sarah Palin's "death panel" claims, end-of-life care was shown to extend the lives of terminally ill lung-cancer patients, according to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. On top of that, those patients were happier and experienced less pain, the study found.

The findings are sure to reignite last year's politically charged debate over palliative care, when Republicans accused the Democrats of endorsing “death panels” for a provision of their healthcare reform bill (later removed) that would have expanded Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians who conduct voluntary consultations with patients about end-of-life care. 

The new study, Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told the New York Times, "shows that palliative care is the opposite of all that rhetoric about ‘death panels.' "

Indeed, PolitiFact named the GOP's death panel accusation their “Lie of the Year.” http://bit.ly/b614Wa

Trouble for BioShield? The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) on Thursday is expected to propose new strategies for combating bioterrorism — proposals that could potentially shift the government's focus away from the BioShield program, under which the FDA can expedite vaccines and other drugs designed to treat victims of bioterror attacks. 

BioShield has been seen as low-hanging fruit for Democrats in search of offsets for other legislative priorities, with party leaders already having eyed BioShield cuts to fund student-loan and war-spending bills. Those cuts haven't materialized, but Thursday's HHS report could lend a better sense of how the program will fare down the line. http://bit.ly/alSawk

Tech companies see dollar signs in healthcare reform. Silicon Valley's tech companies are eying a $10 billion provision of the new healthcare law as a catalyst to advancements in preventive care. http://bit.ly/92r7iT