Science Education & Policy
Since Medicaid paid for 45 percent of the 4 million births in the United States in 2010, and that has been rising steadily, a new paper says that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and expanding Medicaid even more may lead to improved coverage of well-woman and maternity care — and perhaps result in better health outcomes.
Previously, data on Medicaid funding of births did not exist in a comprehensive form so the authors collected all such data on Medicaid births from individual states during the years 2008 to 2010.
They discovered that in 2010 Medicaid paid for 45 percent of all births in the…
Hank |
The FDA is planning Experimental Studies on Consumer Responses to Nutrient Content Claims on Fortified Food - that means they want to find out whether fortifying snack foods with vitamins and noting its nutritional content on labels would convince people to swap out regular old junk food with a slightly less unhealthy form of junk food.
Your 'federal family' at work, supposedly to protect you, again?
No, this is about changing a 20 year old rule regarding labels on foods that have been modified to be a little healthier. These nutritionally modified foods might have labels that say something…
Hank |
Friends don't sue each other, right?
So it would seem to be a bad idea for animal rights groups to sue the EPA because the EPA is going to not do something they never started doing anyway. Activists need the EPA to enforce their goals, they have no authority without the EPA or various other federal laws and bodies to oversee laws that highly-paid lobbyists convince lawmakers to pass.
While it might lead to hurt feelings if you and I sued each other, for activist groups and the government, it is not only smart strategy, they sometimes plan it together in advance. Why? Once a lawsuit is filed,…
In the late 1970s, universities convinced lawmakers that if they could monetize discoveries made with taxpayer funding, they would need less taxpayer funding and better help the private sector.
Congress agreed and in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was passed. The law made it much easier for research findings made by academics to be patented and commercialized, or licensed by companies.
In a new commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, looks at the fluke-…
Hank |
The administration can turn a blind eye to enforcing federal laws when it comes to marijuana farming but they won't have a choice when it comes to pollution - because they will get sued into taking action.
They may be the only ones who can do it. State agencies seem paralyzed by the prospect of standing up to hardened criminals - and that means legal people will remain the focus, which isn't fair. With marijuana increasingly becoming legalized, proponents are now going to run head on into the same government they wanted to take action on their behalf. There are going to be laws and quality…
Hank |
Rep. Randy Hultren(R) and Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D - but not the anti-science crackpot one, that one is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) have introduced House Resolution 276, which would
recognize the last week in April as "National Science Week". That's right, a Republican and a Democrat can work together on something.
Pushing the idea forward is Larry Bock, the science outreach force of nature behind the USA Engineering&Science Festival, whose event last year drew over 250,000 attendees - and they expect to double that in 2014. The resolution basically reads like a love letter to Larry and…
Later this week, the Bureau of Land Management will be closing the opportunity for public comment on its proposed rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing on public lands. The final rule will determine what safeguards against hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) are—or are not—in place on nearly 700 million acres of federally managed mineral rights nationwide. This includes national forests, national wildlife refuges, Tribal lands, private property, and drinking water sources for millions of people.
Unfortunately some of the proposed rules are based on concepts that lack…
Hank |
Though the left-right culture war (all Republican bad, all Democrat gooooooood) is still raging in a small segment of the overall science population (some bloggers, whatever science journalists remain), the rest of America has moved on. People recognize that in the 1990s Democrats were anti-science and in the 2000s Republicans were and now that pendulum has swung again and it will keep happening. Today, food, energy and medical science, the three most pressing short-term issues we face, are vilified by the left.
But the right's subversion of science is not dead yet. Climate change is still a…
Hank |
It's not often that I can say I am stunned by a judicial decision but I have been talking about Yucca Mountain since President Obama took office and immediately honored his deal with Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada to kill the project, after every study by scientists found it the safest place for 70,000 metric tons of high-level waste and a whole lot of money had been spent.
It was the most flagrant scientization of politics in recent memory - and the court has taken notice.
In what the Wall Street Journal calls a "major rebuke" the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus to…
Toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has dropped cultural bombs on both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and two scientists who provided crucial information for Atomic Age carcinogen risk assessment.
Regarding the linear no threshold (LNT) dose-response approach to ionizing radiation exposure in the 1950s, Calabrese says there was deliberate suppression of evidence to prevent the regulatory panel from considering an alternative, threshold model - the LNT model was later generalized to chemical carcinogen risk ssessment.
The first of Calabrese's…