Orshe

The Health Blog’s chief safety worry about running has always been evading the cellphone-wielding drivers making right turns with no regard to who might be in the crosswalk.

But anecdotal reports of deaths during marathons and half-marathons over the past few years have raised public concern over whether running — or at least racing — long distances is hazardous for the heart.

Now that they’ve had a chance to digest the United States Preventive Task Force’s draft recommendations for prostate-cancer screening — which in effect say we should ditch the PSA test — some doctors and policy folks are weighing in.

Settlement Terms?: Federal prosecutors want Johnson & Johnson to pay about $1 billion to settle a years-long investigation of whether the company marketed the antipsychotic Risperdal for unapproved uses, the WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. Settlement talks could break down, and that figure isn’t set in stone, the paper says. J&J said only that discussions were ongoing, and spokespeople for prosecutors wouldn’t comment.

A Massachusetts judge has just signed off on a deal that lets a division of Cerberus Capital Management take over Boston’s Caritas Christi Health Care System.

More here: Cerberus Takeover of Caritas Christi Gets Judge’s Okay

Koska’s solution was to come up with a syringe that was impossible to reuse.

See the original post here:  TEDMED: Marc Koska, Preventing Deaths from Reused Syringes

Manufacturing setbacks put a big dent in Genzyme’s fourth-quarter profit and the company’s outlook for 2010 earnings was lower than analysts had expected. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, Carl Iachn has upped his stake in the biotech.

Now that it’s expanded health-insurance coverage to nearly all of its citizens, Massachusetts is trying to figure out what to do about the rapid rise of health costs.

The latest proposal comes from the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, who yesterday proposed a bill that would give the state the power to review — and, in some cases, reject — rate increases by doctors and hospitals.

Here’s a key paragraph from the bill:

Because they can.

Some Massachusetts hospitals charge private insurers twice as much as other hospitals. It’s not because they deliver higher quality care or treat sicker patients. It’s not because they treat a different mix of uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid and private-insurance patients.

It’s because they have market leverage and can negotiate higher prices in their contracts with insurance companies.

So maybe that big health-care bill won’t pass. Either that, or the Dems will have to thread the legislative needle even as opposition to the bill is running high. That’s the gist of this morning’s Washington coverage (e.g. WSJ, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico).

The key points:

To no one’s surprise, Jon Corzine signed New Jersey’s medical marijuana bill into law yesterday, on his last day on the job as the state’s governor.

That makes 14 states that have legalized medical marijuana. But as both the WSJ and the New York Times note this morning, research into the medical uses of the drug remains rather limited.