Starting tomorrow, when a federal appeals court mulls a pair of contradictory rulings on the constitutionality of the health care law, the next five weeks are slated for a series of challenges to the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit will consider two rulings from Virginia district courts, one upholding the health care law’s individual mandate and another ruling it unconstitutional.
The cases are among the 31 challenges to President Barack Obama’s landmark legislation. Nine have made it to the appeals stage, on a journey likely to culminate in October when the next U.S. Supreme Court session begins. Another nine are still pending in various states’ district courts.
Early next month the next case, one upholding the law, is set to hit the appeals circuit in Cincinnati, with another soon to follow in Atlanta reviewing a Florida judge’s call that the entire law is unconstitutional, according to the New York Times.
In an unusual move, acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal will represent the Feds before the three-judge 4th Circuit panel. Solicitors general are typically kept in reserve until they’re needed to argue before the Supreme Court; Katyal’s appearance in the lower court is a sign of how seriously the Obama administration is taking the case.
American woman wakes up with British accent
A 56-year-old American woman woke up from dental surgery with a British accent in a rare incidence of Foreign Accent Syndrome, in which a small stroke or anoxic event damages the areas of the brain affecting speech.
Karen Butler, a tax consultant from Oregon, traded her Beaver State tones for an amalgam of Scottish, Irish and South African accents. Check it out:
FDA clears first MRSA rapid diagnostic
The FDA cleared the first rapid diagnostic designed to detect antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections.
Longmont, Colo.-based MicroPhage Inc.’s KeyPath MRSA/MSSA Blood Culture Test determines whether bacteria growing in a patient’s positive blood culture sample are methicillin-resistant or methicillin-susceptible within about five hours.
The FDA said it based the clearance on a clinical study of 1,116 blood samples that showed the test to be 98.9 percent accurate for MRSA and 99.4 percent accurate for MSSA.
More and more state medical boards are making physicians’ professional and disciplinary records available to the public, with at least five passing laws designed to create more transparency.
The amount of information released is widely variable, with most requiring doctors to report liability settlements, criminal convictions and the like.
But a few take it a step further. Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Virginia detail felony convictions, actions of other state medical boards and some liability claims. Legislators in Missouri and Texas are debating whether to expand their disclosures; Washington last month passed a law beefing up its physicians’ complaint process.
“The amount of information that’s available varies from state to state,” Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, president of the Federation of State Medical Boards, told American Medical News. “Every board makes information available in some form.”
Biotech the next hot job market
Biomedical engineering jobs are expected to grow by 72 percent over the next decade, according to the U.S. Labor Dept.
The demand for people to develop and test health care innovations is also expected to drive demand for physicians, according to the department, which listed health care-related employment in 11 of the 20 hottest fields.
The Labor Dept. also said hiring by American companies hit a five-year high in April, highlighting the economic recovery’s underlying strength, even as the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.0 percent, rising 0.2 percent from a two-year low of 8.8 percent in March
