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Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Feature Highlights Recent Blog Entries
"Blog Watch" offers readers a roundup of health policy-related blog posts.Appropriately, the last of the Senate Finance Committee"s three major public roundtables on health reform issues was on finance. Keith Hennessy lauds economist Kate Baicker"s testimony (.pdf) and says it helps connect reform ideas to a system of third-party payment. Hennessy says the current system leads people to "spend more of other people"s money than they do of their own, and less wisely." Hennessy explores the example of employer-sponsored insurance, which he says makes health insurance appear less expensive to employees than it is.Meanwhile, the New Republic"s Jonathan Cohn, who has been calling attention to potential ways of financing the significant cost of reform, recommends the testimony of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Robert Greenstein. Greenstein testified that there are no "painless" ways of raising money for reform, and said, "This leads to my first recommendation, in the form of a plea to the Committee. Please do not take any offset options off the table at this time. I believe you ultimately will need to put together a package that contains an array of spending and revenue offsets." Offsets could include removing or limiting the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance. Bob Lazsewski strenuously disagrees. He illustrates a post titled "Paying for a Big Part of Health Care Reform With New Taxes Would Be a Terrible Mistake!" with a graph of the trends in health insurance premiums over the last 20 years and says, "paying for most of health care reform by raising taxes would be nothing less than cowardly and fiscally irresponsible." He continues, "the Congress is so desperate to find money and so unwilling to anger any powerful health care special interests we better get ready for some interesting rationalizations to promote tax increases in the place of fundamental reforms."After the hearing, ranking member Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) gave a presentation at the Heritage Foundation on his preferences for bipartisan reform legislation and the Foundry"s Marguerite Higgins blogged Enzi"s key points. She says the senator wants to increase affordability, use private plans for coverage and ensure a bill is fully paid for.The White House appears to be initiating additional outreach efforts to mobilize support. Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post"s Daily Dose reports that President Obama"s administration chose to send its first WhiteHouse.gov e-mail on health reform Wednesday. Vargas says, "It"s only fitting that Obama"s first official e-mail from the White House is about health care reform. As early as December, the incoming Obama administration began using new media tools to build grassroots support around the issue."Interesting elsewhere:
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New Supplement May Help Slow Sight Loss In Elderly
Queen"s University Belfast academics have helped develop an antioxidant supplement which may slow down sight loss in elderly people.
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New National Adolescent Weight Control Registry Will Recognize Successful Teen Weight Loss Efforts
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 16 percent of children ages 6-19 years are overweight or obese - a number that has tripled since 1980.
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Teens Influenced By Movie Characters Who Smoke, Both The Good Guys And The Bad Guys

Dartmouth researchers have determined that movie characters who smoke, regardless of whether they are "good guys" or "bad guys," influence teens to try smoking. The study, published in the July 2009 issue of the journal Pediatrics, is titled "Adolescent Smoking: Who Matters More, Good Guys or Bad Guys?" "Previous studies have confirmed a link between smoking in movies and the initiation of smoking by adolescents, and we wanted to dig deeper into the data to see if the type of character who is smoking matters. Is it "good guys" or "bad guys" that have more of an influence?" said Susanne Tanski, the lead author on the study, and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School. "It"s true that "bad guys" are more often smokers in the movies, but there really are not that many "bad guys" compared to "good guys". Episode for episode, youth who saw negative character smoking were more likely to start smoking, but since overall there is so much more exposure to "good guy" smoking, the net effect is similar." The survey also revealed that low-risk teens, based on sensation-seeking behavior, are more strongly influenced by "bad guy" movie smoking. "This suggests that it"s alluring for "good" kids to emulate the "bad" characters on the movie screen," said Tanksi. Tanski is part of a team of researchers at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) who have been studying the connections between popular culture and risky behavior in adolescents. They have published numerous journal articles that document the link between exposure to smoking and drinking alcohol in movies and teens using tobacco and alcohol. In May 2009, two members of this team, James Sargent and Todd Heatherton, published a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association that reported declining trends in both occurrences of smoking in movies and in smoking among U.S. eight graders between 1996 and 2007. In that letter, the authors state, "[M]ovie smoking represents only one of several factors that contribute to youth smoking trends, including the marketing of tobacco, price of cigarettes, restrictions imposed by the Master Settlement Agreement in 1999, and state prevention programs. ò€¦ Nonetheless, the downward trend in movie smoking is consistent with an influence on downward trends in adolescent smoking." Sargent is a professor of pediatrics and the co-director of the Cancer Control Research Program at DMS"s Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Heatherton is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. Tanski acknowledges that, although there is a downward trend, smoking still occurs in many movies that teens watch, particularly given the popularity of movie channels and video rentals providing access to older films. "Parents should limit movie viewing and specifically restrict access to R-rated movies, which tend to contain more smoking," she said. "When teens do see movies or TV shows that contain smoking, parents should talk with them in an effort to discourage initiation of smoking." In addition to Tanski, authors on the Pediatrics study include: Mike Stoolmiller with the Oregon Social Learning Center at the University of Oregon, Sonya Dal Cin with the University of Michigan, and Keilah Worth, Jennifer Gibson, and James Sargent all with Dartmouth Medical School. Sue Knapp Dartmouth College


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