Health

CNBC - The Biden administration on Wednesday said it will impose inflation penalties on 64 prescription drugs for the third quarter of this year, lowering costs for certain older Americans enrolled in Medicare.... President Joe Biden has made lowering U.S. drug prices a key pillar of his health-care agenda and reelection platform for 2024. A provision of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act requires drugmakers to pay rebates to Medicare, the federal health program for Americans over age 65, if they hike the price of a medication faster than the rate of inflation.

Do You Really Need to Use Toothpaste?

Epoch Times -  U.S. Supreme Court justices have rebuffed a challenge to a Connecticut law that revoked religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements.  The nation’s top court declined an appeal to consider overturning a split lower court ruling that found that the law was constitutional.  The justices didn’t comment on the rejection. The law, enacted in 2021, ended the decades-old religious exemptions to vaccine requirements for schoolchildren and kids in day care. The only exception is for children who had already been granted religious exemptions. Medical exemptions are still available.

Epoch Times - A new study found that a significant number of older Americans continue to use small doses of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease despite two major heart associations having reversed their guidance on the practice.In a paper released on June 24 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, some 18.5 million adults aged 60 and older who have no cardiovascular disease reported taking a preventative aspirin in 2021. About 3.3 million of those individuals were taking daily aspirin without a doctor’s recommendation, it said.

For decades, a daily dose of 81 milligrams of aspirin was recommended by heart associations and physicians to reduce the chance of developing a heart attack, stroke, or another cardiovascular problem.

But in 2019, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association changed their guidelines on daily aspirin usage, saying that it should only be taken infrequently because older adults can see an increased risk of developing internal bleeding. The daily aspirin practice is still recommended for individuals who have a high risk of a heart attack or stroke.

 

Free Press - How worried should we be about bird flu, really? One nation is taking no chances. Finland is the first country to offer a vaccine for the virus. How many cases have been detected in humans? Precisely zero. So why bother? It’s something to do with mink. (Reuters)