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Bill Clinton was admitted to the hospital for chest pain today and had two stents placed in one of the arteries around his heart.

Here’s what that means:

A stent is a wire mesh tube that’s used to prop open an artery. That’s a stent in the picture.

Stents are often used for patients with unstable angina — sudden chest pain that can be a prelude to a heart attack.

Here’s the Health Blog’s little corner of the Greek debt saga: The nation’s government-run hospitals owe about $9.5 billion to drug and device manufacturers, the Financial Times reports.

Senior European pharma execs are flying to Athens for talks, and the industry wants the European Commission to find that Greece has broken EU late-payment rules. A deal may be worked out to restructure the debt; a similar deal in 2004 included a significant discount, the FT says.

Venture capital funding was way down last year, but health care fell less than other sectors. A few different sets of figures are out today — one from Dow Jones VentureSource, another from the National Venture Capital Association.

The figures from the groups differ a bit, but the broad outlines are similar.

Sure, Boston Scientific’s acquisition of Guidant may have been poorly timed and financially painful. But at least we can say, according to a wildly unscientific poll, that it wasn’t the worst deal of the decade.

Our colleagues over at the WSJ’s Deal Journal today asked readers to weigh in on the worst of the worst — six deals gone bad, plucked from the past decade. Here’s what Deal Journal said about the Boston Scientific-Guidant deal:

Sen. Chuck Grassley has been following the money in health care for years now. Yesterday, he wrote to the AMA, the American Cancer Society and a bunch of other nonprofit advocacy groups to ask how much of their funding comes from the drug, device and insurance industries.

Stryker, a big medical device company, said today that it’s spending $525 million to buy a company called Ascent Healthcare Solutions that helps hospitals recycle medical devices designed for a single use.

There’s more buzz this morning about private equity’s interest in health care. This time, the reported target is Siemens’s hearing aid business.

Sure, hearing aids may not sound like a sexy, go-go business. But apparently they’re the sort of solid money-maker that private capital likes these days — the unit could fetch up to 3 billion Euros ($4.5 billion or so), according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters.

With the medical establishment warning of a looming shortage of primary-care docs and general surgeons, Sen. Chuck Schumer is getting ready to introduce an amendment to the Senate health-care bill that would add 2,000 new medical residency slots, the WSJ reports this morning. But adding residency slots may not be enough to guarantee enough primary-care doctors and general surgeons.

Shares of Medtronic were up about 5% in midday trading today. No surprise there, given that the company just reported higher-than-expected profits.

But shares of Boston Scientific and St. Jude, two of Medtronic’s main competitors, were also both up by more than 4% by lunchtime. What gives?

The CBO may grab all the headlines in wonky conversations about the costs and effects of big health-care bills. But the Joint Committee on Taxation, another nonpartisan body, also plays a key role: Estimating how much revenue new taxes are likely to generate.