"Health & Medical News"

Many of the country’s largest health plans have agreed on a set of standards to be used nationwide as the basis for physician pay-for-performance initiatives and tiered networks. Underlying the effort is insurers’ fears that states could develop 50 different sets of regulations to govern these programs — a concern sparked by last year’s crackdown by New York’s attorney general.

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Hormonal birth control pills may increase markers of cardiovascular disease risk and the chance of developing cervical cancer, according to a handful of studies published and presented at medical meetings within the past month. Experts say, however, that while these studies help paint a more complete picture of the effects of this form of contraception, the positives still outweigh the negatives.

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Washington — Trained in family practice medicine, Caroline Fife, MD, didn’t know what she was getting into when she decided to begin treating people with lymphedema.

She was operating a wound clinic at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston and was receiving calls from people seeking relief for their swollen limbs. They seemed to have nowhere else to go. So she thought, “How hard can it be? I know a lot about leg swelling.”

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U.S. prisons now house a record 2.1 million inmates, but a U.S. Census report says that prison growth began to level off during the early 2000s, the Washington Post reported Sept. 27.

The 2006 census data in the American Community Survey showed that the prison population grew 4 percent since 2000, a far more modest increase that the 77-percent growth between 1990 and 2000. Experts generally agree that tough drug sentencing laws led to the spike in prison populations during the 1990s.

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