Over a Thousand National and State Organizations Strongly Oppose Medicaid Cuts   Announcement at the NAMI web site - "In a letter sent to President Bush on January 12, 2005, over a thousand national and state organizations expressed their strong opposition to Medicaid cuts or funding caps that would likely shift billions of dollars in health care costs to state and local governments. The organizations composed of labor, advocacy, health care, education, children, elderly and religious groups, said it is clear that reducing federal funding would move policy in the wrong direction. The organizations believe that states need reliable and consistent federal Medicaid funding to sustain their Medicaid programs. The organizations oppose changes in the current structure of the Medicaid program that include converting the program into a block grant or otherwise imposing caps on federal funding."  
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Billion-dollar deficits greet several states   Stateline.org story - "California sports the most red ink, with an estimated $9 billion budget shortfall, followed by New York and New Jersey with a looming deficit of $4 billion each. States confronting projected budget deficits in the $1 billion range for fiscal 2006 include: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin, all of which have two-year budgets, and Illinois and Massachusetts, which have a one-year budget cycle. ..."  
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Consumers don’t feel withholding disability income helps adherence   Item in CMHA/Ontario's Mental Health Notes - " A majority of consumers say that withholding disability income through a representative payee would not help consumers adhere to treatment, according to an article in Psychiatric Services. Withholding disability funds as leverage may also be seen as coercive and undermine family or therapeutic relationships. The representative payee system empowers an individual or institution to receive the government disability income of a person with mental illness and ensure that the person’s basic needs, including food, shelter, and clothing, are met. It is used for individuals who are unable to manage their finances due to their psychiatric disability. According to the study, an estimated 800,000 Americans with psychiatric disabilities have a representative payee." An abstract of the study is available at no cost.  
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Authors Warn of Inaccuracies and Explore Thorny Issues Concerning the Use and Measurement of Race in Health and Social Science Research...   APA press release - "New and sophisticated methods for studying the relationship between human genetic differences, the environment, health and behavior, all made possible by the completion of the Human Genome Project, have made traditional race-based measurements of human differences obsolete, according to numerous authors writing in a special issue of the American Psychologist devoted to Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era (January, 2005). American Psychologist is the journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). In a series of articles, leading researchers discuss racial health disparities and the controversial area of intelligence, while also carefully outlining specific instances and ways in which researchers should measure or use race." See the lead article in the journal, Genes, Race and Psycholgy in the Genome Era (Adobe Acrobat format), which is available at no charge online.  
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The Mentally Ill as Frequent Fliers   New York Times editorial - "Pressed by rising costs, the states are scrambling for ways to keep millions of people who are released from jails and prisons each year from coming back. An obvious first step would be to abolish senselessly punitive laws that make it difficult for felons to reconstruct their lives, like those in all 50 states that bar ex-convicts from occupations that have nothing at all to do with their crimes. Another prudent step would be to create high-quality programs that provide newly released people with counseling and job placement. Perhaps most crucially, those who qualify need assistance in getting back their federal disability and Medicaid benefits; inmates typically lose such benefits when they find themselves locked up for 30 days or more. The loss of benefits is especially devastating for the mentally ill, who make up one-sixth of the prison population and who are particularly susceptible to recidivism. Most of them get psychiatric drugs and treatment for the first time in jail. They often improve quickly, but deteriorate just as fast when they are released without being re-enrolled in federal disability programs or Medicaid, which would give them access to medication and psychiatric care..." [Viewing New York Times resources requires registration, which is free].  
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Tennessee Retreat On Medicaid Points to Struggle   Washington Post story - "On Jan. 10, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat elected in 2002 on a promise to rescue TennCare, announced he is cutting 323,000 low-income adults from the program and limiting services for 400,000 others. Like many other governors, Bredesen said that Tennessee's expanded Medicaid program is devouring the state budget and that he cannot afford what had been hailed as one of the most generous government health plans in the nation. ... The announcement sent shivers through health care advocates nationwide who see in TennCare's retreat the start of a bleak trend to scale back government-paid care at the same time the private sector is trimming benefits. A day later, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) proposed giving Medicaid clients vouchers for private health coverage, making Florida the first state to let insurers set benefits for poor clients. And this week, New York Gov. George E. Pataki (R) is scheduled to slash $1 billion from his state's Medicaid program."  
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Dispute Puts a Medical Journal Under Fire   New York Times story - "On New Year's Day, the British medical journal BMJ published a news article suggesting that "missing" documents from a decade-old lawsuit indicated that Eli Lilly & Company, the maker of Prozac, had minimized data about the drug's risks of causing suicidal or violent behavior. Within days, the article was cited in hundreds of television and newspaper reports. An outraged Washington lawmaker demanded to know if Lilly had hidden the information from the Food and Drug Administration. While company officials refuted the article's assertions, it was still repeatedly cited. And last Thursday, Lilly spent about $800,000 to run full-page advertisements in 15 major publications to dispute the article. The incident may prove to be a messy one for the BMJ, which is based in London and owned by the British Medical Association, a professional group..." [Viewing New York Times resources requires registration, which is free].  
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NIH Revises Plan for Quick, Free Access to Study Results   Washington Post story - "An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific enterprise they support. The initial plan, encouraged by Congress and hailed by patient advocacy groups, called for the results of NIH-funded research to be posted on a publicly accessible Web site within six months after they are published in a scientific journal. ... In the final version of the plan, however, the recommended six-month deadline for posting results has been stretched to a year. That change has angered many advocates of public access, who have argued it isn't fair that taxpayers must either wait or ante up to see the results of research they have already paid for..." [Viewing Washington Post stories requires registration, which is free.]  
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Program Effective at Reducing Depression in Teens   Story at Medical News Today - "An intervention for adolescents aimed at improving the quality of treatment for depression is effective at reducing depression, according to a study in the January 19 issue of JAMA. Lifetime prevalence for major depression in adolescence is estimated at 15 percent to 20 percent, current prevalence is estimated as high as 6 percent, and 28.3 percent of adolescents report periods during the past year of depressive symptoms leading to impairment, according to background information in the article. Untreated depression is associated with suicide, a leading cause of death for youth aged 15 to 24 years, and with other negative outcomes including school dropout, pregnancy, substance abuse, and adult depression. Few depressed adolescents receive effective treatment for depression in primary care settings." See also the abstract of the study in JAMA.  
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