"Health & Medical News"

A California appeals court dealt another blow to health plans over their policy cancellation tactics.

The 4th District Court of Appeal unanimously said insurers have a responsibility to make sure patients’ policy applications are complete and accurate before issuing coverage — not after expensive claims come in the door. Judges said plans cannot revoke patients’ policies unless they fully investigate pre-enrollment forms up front or insurers show patients intentionally misled them.

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Washington — The American College of Physicians has endorsed the concept of a single-payer health care system for the first time.

In a new position paper, the organization, which represents 124,000 physicians in internal medicine and related subspecialties, identified a system in which the federal government is the sole third-party payer as one of two reform vehicles to achieve universal coverage. The other is a public-private system that includes a legal guarantee that everyone has access to coverage and that offers health care subsidies to low-income residents.

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Two teams of scientists simultaneously announced they have reprogrammed human skin cells to obtain pluripotency, the characteristic hailed in embryonic stem cells as having the potential for therapeutic breakthroughs in areas ranging from Parkinson’s disease to diabetes.

Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin created the so-called induced pluripotent cells by introducing different combinations of genes into skin cells that are normally switched off after embryonic cells differentiate into various cell types. The results were published last month in Read the rest of this entry »