The Romney campaign is sending out a flyer in Northern Virginia pledging to fight Lyme Disease, which is describes as a “massive epidemic threatening Virginia”:

The Washington Post notes that “According to the CDC there are less than 1,000 reported cases of Lyme disease in Virginia a year — in a state of eight million people.”

It’s fairly difficult to contract Lyme disease because “an infected tick must be attached to the skin for at least 36 hours to transmit Lyme bacteria.” For those who are affected, there is a straight-forward and effective treatments for the disease — a course of antibiotics for 2 to 4 weeks.

So what’s the point of this Romney mailer?

A highly influential social conservative in Virginia, Michael Farris, believes that people can contract “chronic Lyme disease” that must be treated with long-term antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control says there is no such thing as “chronic Lyme disease” and “long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease has been associated with serious complications.”

You can read about these complications in this article from “Clinical Infectious Diseases,” the official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, called “Death from Inappropriate Therapy for Lyme Disease.”

Farris “claims that his wife is a chronic Lyme sufferer as are all his seven children.”

Farris, who has no medical training, was invited to speak with Romney on his campaign bus a couple of weeks ago. Farris said that he and Romney “talked about Lyme disease. It was cordial and encouraging.” Here’s a photo of the meeting from Romney’s Facebook page:

The Romney flier advocates providing “local physicians with protection from lawsuits to ensure they can treat the disease with the aggressive antibiotics that are required.” Farris’ wife receives treatment from “Dr. Joseph Jemsek, who moved his practice to Washington, D.C., after losing his medical license in North Carolina for treating patients with long-term antibiotics.”

Tommy Thompson, the Republican senate candidate in Wisconsin, couldn’t decide if he supports maintaing provisions of the Affordable Care Act, during a debate against challenger Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D) on Friday. Responding to a question about health care reform, the former governor and Health and Human Services secretary insisted that the entire law should be gutted, but seconds later admitted that certain provisions “absolutely need to be maintained”:

QUESTION: Governor, just so we’re clear. There is nothing in the Affordable Care Act right now that’s worth maintaining?

THOMPSON: No, no. Right now, the Affordable Care Act has 20 taxes increases. We got to do away with the Affordable Care Act and then we can put in things like making sure that individuals could be covered … But there are things in there like wellness and prevention, Bob, that I drafted when I was Secretary that are in the Affordable Care Act that absolutely need to be maintained. Chronic illnesses is something I started when I was Secretary of Health. That’s got to be maintained and be able to continue.

Watch it:

Thompson’s contradictory views on reform have haunted his campaign. As a lobbyist for health care interests, Thompson “was very helpful in implementation,” to the Obama administration and even urged Republican governors to adopt the law’s health insurance exchanges.

Last April, he lauded Obamacare’s payment reform provisions, saying they give “great discretion” for exermination with “alternative payment systems.” He even tried to dissuade the GOP from repealing the measure, telling CNBC in November 2010, “When it’s all said and done, you’re not going to be able to repeal health care because President Obama is not going to sign it… And they don’t have enough votes to override a veto, so why push a cart uphill when you know it’s not going to be able to get to the top?”

Thompson’s senate campaign website now lists “repealing Obamacare and replacing it with market-based solutions” among his top legislative priorities.

Through federal guidelines set in the Health Hunger-Free Kids Act, the National School Lunch Program is doubling fruits and vegetables, increases whole grains and cuts sodium in school lunches. Critics of the law have seized on new calorie caps for these lunches, pointing to some students’ complaints that they are still hungry during the day. But USDA officials say it’s just part of the adjustment period, and introducing more healthy snacks in school could help students feel more satisfied:

School lunch trays are a bit lighter this year after Congress-approved calorie limits on school lunches went into effect in August. The new regulations, which were championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign to fight childhood obesity, have inspired protests and even a video parody from students who claim the reduced lunches are making them go hungry. [...]

[Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack said the Obama Administration is working with school districts to create snack programs and encouraging parents to pack extra food for their active students to munch on before football practice or band rehearsal.

“We understand that change is difficult,” Vilsack said. “Some folks love it, some folks have had questions about it, but that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with 32 million children and you’re dealing with over a hundred thousand school districts.”

On NPR, Jessica Donze Black of Pew Trust’s Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project points out that the 850 calorie cap isn’t actually drastically different from lunches before. “When we look at what students were actually eating on average a couple of years ago, it was around 790 calories in an average lunch.” Even so, the USDA is in the process of releasing new standards for “competitive foods” found in vending machines and school stores, so students will have healthy options for snacks in between meals at school if they feel they are left unsatisfied at lunch.

Studies find that better nutrition, including more fruits and vegetables, actually make people feel fuller. But conservative critics like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — who calls the new lunch guidelines “the perfect example of what is wrong with government” — misportray these standards as creating a “scant diet,” even though they are actually in compliance with Institute of Medicine recommendations. King’s alternative proposal for limitless calories in school lunches contradicts both the science on good nutrition and reality of high childhood obesity and overweight levels.

In a major shift within the employer-sponsored health benefit model, Sears Holdings Corp. and Darden Restaurants Inc. will begin offering employees a choice of health plans on “corporate exchanges” beginning in 2013.

Although spokesmen for both companies have been quick to point out that, at this point, the firms will still be providing their employees with health benefits and not just a pile of cash with which to buy insurance, the move is largely seen as the first step towards a benefits system in which employers play a less direct role in employees’ coverage, and could influence thousands of other firms to follow suit if succesful. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the basic idea is that by offering employees more flexibility in choosing plans, both workers and employers can save on health costs:

“It puts the choice in the employee’s hands to buy up or buy down,” said Danielle Kirgan, a senior vice president at Darden. The owner of chains including Olive Garden and Red Lobster will let its approximately 45,000 full-time employees choose the new coverage in November, to kick in Jan. 1. Darden says that employees with families to cover will be given more money to buy insurance than employees covering just themselves.

The hope is that insurers will compete more vigorously to get workers to sign up, which will lower overall health-care costs. Darden and Sears are both currently self-insured, meaning that the cost of claims each year comes out of company coffers. [...]

“Within the next two or three years, it’s going to be mainstream,” said Ken Goulet, executive vice president at WellPoint Inc. The insurer will roll out a product next year called Anthem Health Marketplace that lets employers offer a variety of its plans to workers, paired with a fixed contribution. Mr. Goulet said it is close to signing up more than 30 midsize and large employers for early next year, including one with more than 50,000 workers.

This method has innate risks to it, the biggest being the possibility that employer contributions won’t keep up with medical inflation, thus shifting costs onto consumers. But if the corporate exchange model pans out as advocates hope, then it could be a sign of good things to come for similar exchange-driven models, including Obamacare.

An estimated 4,800 people will receive care from a free four-day Los Angeles health clinic next week, The Lead Type reports. The clinic will run from next Thursday to Sunday to provide a variety of health services — including immunizations, women’s health screenings, dental cleanings, and eye exams — to Americans who don’t have medical insurance and can’t usually access this type of care:

Some people began lining up as early as Friday to ensure they obtain a wristband, which will be required for admission to the clinic. Distribution of the wristbands is expected to begin at 1 p.m.

Care Harbor has run several similar clinics in the Los Angeles area over the past few years. A four-day event last October at the Sports Arena was attended by about 5,000 people.

Medical practitioners who take part in the event volunteer their time and services. Care Harbor officials said they are still looking for additional volunteers for this week’s clinic.

The sheer number of participants in the Care Harbor clinic paints a harrowing picture of the human suffering wrought by a broken, Darwinian health care system. Stories like this serve as a reminder that every time the GOP votes to repeal Obamacare, they are voting to deprive Americans of essential screening and public health services — and forcing inadequately insured men, women, and children such as these to resort to desperate measures for fulfilling their medical needs.

A new Urban Institute Health Policy Center study finds that premium support models, such as the proposed Romney/Ryan Medicare plan, are more likely to increase excess costs in the program.

According to the report, turning Medicare into a “premium support” program would encourage private insurers to draw less costly beneficiaries from traditional Medicare, leading to bloated per-beneficiary reimbursements. The study arrives at this conclusion by extrapolating existing trends in Medicare Advantage (MA), which has appreciably higher per-capita costs than traditional Medicare in 75 percent of counties serviced:

The debate around premium support misses the potential within Medicare’s existing structure to harness the market to promote efficiency and to do so on terms that do not put beneficiaries at risk for escalating costs…By design, MA plans have been paid above per capita costs for equivalent beneficiaries in traditional Medicare, and have used these payments to provide extra benefits that have successfully attracted more than a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries into private health plans.

Measures taken by the Affordable Care Act significantly reduce these extra payments. But they do not eliminate the long-standing bias favoring payment policies designed to attract private plans rather than to encourage lower costs. Our analysis of recent MA experience shows that most private plans are more, not less, costly than traditional Medicare. In fact, MA plans with the lowest costs have been found to serve only 10 percent of MA enrollees, despite their attractiveness in the current market, and they do not reflect the typical MA experience. Only in the highest cost areas for traditional Medicare do typical MA plans deliver care at lower costs than the public program. Even this difference is likely exaggerated, given continuing evidence of favorable risk selection (that is, disproportionate enrollment of low cost enrollees) in private plans. In short, overpayment, not lower costs, drives most of MA plans’ success in competing with the public program for enrollees.

The GOP defends premium support models like the Romney/Ryan plan by claiming that they will exert downward pressure on providers and encourage competitive bidding in the insurance industry. The logic is that seniors, whose Medicare subsidies would stagnate relative to the rising cost of health care, will look for the best deals on the market and thus force insurers to compete, lowering overall health care costs.

But as the Urban Institute report demonstrates, private insurance competition is unlikely to yield much in the way of savings since providers would simply adapt their business models to pick up the least costly beneficiaries. Studies have repeatedly shown that this is the exact kind of adverse selection and cost-shifting that occurs in Medicare Advantage plans. Transitioning traditional Medicare away from its current defined-benefit model into a premium support one would exacerbate the problem, leading to increased premiums, more overpayments to private insurers, and even higher costs in the health care industry.

A report from the non-partisan Grand Canyon Institute suggests that if Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) rejects Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid program, it could take a toll on more than just the low-income residents of her state who struggle to afford health coverage — in fact, it could also cost Arizona potential savings and new jobs.

According to the nonprofit research institute’s estimates, expanding the Medicaid program could help save Arizona $1.2 billion and create over 20,000 jobs in the state over the next four years. In light of their findings, researchers at the nonprofit institute strongly recommended that Arizona accept the Medicaid expansion under President Obama’s health reform law:

The report’s author, Dave Wells, the Grand Canyon Institute’s Research Director, noted that “by increasing Medicaid coverage to 133 percent of the federal poverty line, the state would reap huge economic benefits. Compared to current policy, it would add 21,000 jobs compared to 15,000 jobs created by following 100 percent of the federal poverty line. The 21,000 jobs would reduce the state’s unemployment rate by 0.7 percent, and increase economic growth in the state during the first year of full implementation by nearly 1 percent.” [...]

George Cunningham, chair of the Grand Canyon Institute, explained, “The payback on the state investment in expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty line is 5 to 1; more than $5 will come into Arizona from the Federal government for every dollar Arizona expends. You can’t beat that return on investment.”

The study points out that by expanding Medicaid and qualifying for higher federal matching funds over the first four years of its implementation, Arizona could save $1.2 billion from the state’s general fund. Although the state would be expending more money to cover additional low-income residents, the influx of federal funds would exceed that expense. The study’s authors also used economic software to simulate the effects of three options for the state — accepting the Medicaid expansion, rejecting the expansion to continue the state’s current Medicaid policies, and continuing an amended state Medicaid policy that Arizona enacted in the midst of a recent budget crisis — and found that expanding Medicaid would impact other sectors of the state’s economy and help the state add thousands of new jobs.

Other researchers have also documented the potential cost-saving effects of expanding Medicaid in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Hospital officials have also spoken out in favor of the proposed expansion, saying their hospitals could stand to lose millions if governors choose to reject the Medicaid expansion. However, despite the potential positive results in store for states that choose to expand the Medicaid program under Obamacare, some GOP governors continue to stand in the way. Republican governors in states including Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Louisiana have pledged to refuse the Medicaid expansion. Brewer has not publicly taken a position yet, saying she will wait to decide until after the November election.

A new study from Families USA compares both Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform law and proposed health care plans as a presidential candidate with President Obama’s health care reform. The report finds that on both a national and state-by-state level, Romney’s proposed reforms would lead to a substanitally higher uninsurance rate and considerably less financial support for American families trying to access health coverage than Obamacare would. A key element of the study notes that Romney’s plan uses tax deductions (relief on the amount of taxable income workers have to claim) as opposed to Obamacare’s tax credits (an actual reduction in the total taxes workers pay) as its method of premium support, thus reaching fewer Americans and providing them with less subsidies.

As the following chart from the report demonstrates, Romney’s proposals would provide working families little more than half the subsidies that Obamacare does, and by 2022 Romney’s plan would lead to a net 50 million more uninsured Americans than Obamacare would:

Earlier this month, Missouri legislators overrode Gov. Jay Nixon’s (D) veto to approve a bill that allow employers or health insurance providers to stop offering coverage for contraception, abortion, or sterilization if doing so violated their religious or moral convictions.

But before lawmakers passed the new law to push back against Obamacare, the state already had a decade-old law that “allows insurers to offer policies without contraception coverage to people or employers who say it violates their moral or religious beliefs,” according to the Associated Press.

Now, under the original contraception provision, the Missouri state department of insurance has issued a $1.5 million fine to insurance provider Aetna for failing to let employers opt out of contraception coverage. Additionally, Aetna provided insurance policies that covered abortion without an additional premium — in violation of a 1983 state law preventing abortion coverage in basic coverage. One official said Missouri’s settlement with Aetna is a reminder of the state’s current, restrictive laws:

“This settlement should be a reminder to all health benefit plans covering Missourians, that state law has stringent requirements honoring the religious and moral beliefs of insurance customers,” Missouri insurance director John Huff. “We will be enforcing Missouri’s decade-old contraception coverage law, as well as the new law on the subject, anywhere we see violations.” [...]

Under that newly enacted law, individuals, employers and insurers can cite religious or moral exemptions from mandatory insurance coverage for abortion, contraception and sterilization. It also changes a “may” to a “shall” when describing an insurer’s duty to provide policies without contraception coverage for those who request it.

It’s unclear what will happen to Missouri’s laws about contraception coverage because federal law invalidates them. The measures directly contradict with Obamacare’s regulation, which mandates that insurance plans cover contraception at no additional cost. The exemptions for religious organizations and accommodations for nonprofit religiously affiliated organizations do not include employers’ personal moral and religious views, making the Missouri regulations invalid under the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, federal law “shall be the supreme law of the land,” and Missouri lawmakers cannot change that with a new or existing law to restrict women’s access to birth control.

What do you get when you combine the tech industry with the health care industry? One answer is “mHealth,” which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines as “the use of mobile and wireless devices to improve health outcomes, healthcare services, and health research.”

Mashable estimates that there are about 40,000 mobile health apps currently available for tablets and smartphones — comprised of a wide range of apps that can help patients access their health records electronically, log exercise time, monitor blood pressure levels, track pregnancies, and check nearby pollen levels, among other things. By some estimates, the number of 2012 downloads for mobile health apps will reach around 247 million by the end of this year, nearly double the figure from last year.

The health care education portal Allied Health World created an infographic to communicate some of the impact that the rise of mHealth has had on health care consumers, including improved access to medical health information and significant savings on health care services for some segments of the U.S. population:

In fact, as a growing number of Americans consumers and businesses capitalize on mHealth, the Food and Drug Administration is paving the way for the safe and practical implementation of mobile technology in the health care sector. Last year, the FDA released guidelines for mobile health apps to help ensure that emerging health technologies are providing consumers with accurate information before they hit the market. The FDA’s website has also now includes an mHealth page under its Medical Devices section, noting that the agency “encourages further development of mobile medical apps that improve health care and provide consumers and health care professionals with valuable health information very quickly.”

A new wave of anti-obesity ads launched this week in Minnesota is gaining new criticism for shaming parents instead of helping to address the nation’s obesity crisis. One of the ads in the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota media campaign shows two boys at a fast food restaurant bragging about how much their dads can eat when an overweight man walks up and looks guiltily at his tray of burgers and fries. The other features a mother pushing a grocery cart loaded with junk food while her young daughter mimics her food choices.

Critics are arguing that these ads are unhelpful because they shame people who are overweight or obese, rather than offering them education or support. Lindy West, a blogger at Jezebel who called out the ad campaign, told NPR that the ads are “condescending.” “Fat people know about nutrition. We know that eating four cheeseburgers a day is not the way to go,” she said:

“Fat people hate being fat, because everyone’s mean to you, and you can’t find clothes that fit you, and you can’t fit into the chair at the restaurant,” she says. “We’ve been shaming fat people for decades, and clearly it’s not doing anyone any good.”

The ads were created by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. Marc Manley, the vice president and chief prevention officer, says he was very involved with the creation and messaging behind the ads.

“Our intent in creating these ads was really just to show good parents having moments of realization that they needed to change their own behavior in order to send the right message to their kid,” Manley says.

Manley told the Atlantic that Minnesota needs a stronger campaign to drive home the message in the hopes that parents will have an “aha moment” and change their behaviors to instill better habits in their children.

But researchers at Yale University found that messages that try to shame people into losing weight sometimes backfire because they “instill less motivation to improve health.” Negative messages are more likely to perpetuate stigmas against people who are overweight. As the Los Angeles Times points out, “Heavy workers earn less, are more likely to be passed over for jobs and promotions, and are more likely than their thinner peers to be viewed as lazy and undisciplined, researchers have found.” Instead, the Yale study found that the most effective public health campaigns didn’t even mention obesity and focused on specific ideas to improve health and empower people.

The insurance industry’s manufactured separation of mental health services from more “traditional” medical care in billing codes has long been a source of frustration for health care professionals, creating unnecessary confusion and endangering the health of patients whose illnesses often have both physical and mental components.

But a Colorado-based nonprofit insurance company is striving to change that with a first-of-its-kind integration program aimed at combining the disparate services into a single, coordinated primary care model, as part of a broad effort to shift the U.S. health care industry towards more primary care. Under the pilot program, Rocky Mountain Health Plans will provide so-called “umbrella payments” to three primary care practices to encourage integrated patient care, while giving per-visit fee-for-service reimbursements to three other practices that will serve as control groups for the experiment:

Care could include a traditional office visit with a doctor or a health coach, email exchanges, telephone counseling or a typical counseling session. Patients will get all the care in the familiar setting of their primary care office. [...]

The aim is to prove quickly that patients do better when doctors are paid to keep patients well rather than worrying about seeing as many patients as fast as possible to keep the cash flowing. Rocky Mountain ultimately wants to change the way it pays providers throughout Colorado and spur change around the country.

“This is not an academic exercise,” said Patrick Gordon, director of government programs for Rocky Mountain and executive director the Colorado Beacon Consortium, a coalition of nonprofit health groups that is seeking to boost the quality and efficiency of health care in western Colorado. “This will be a transformative pilot that is being built with the goal of replicating success across the country.”

One of the biggest hurdles to instituting these more efficient, primary care models is adequate financing — that’s why Rocky Mountain will be injecting funds into the Colorado health care system to jump-start reform efforts. “We’re going to take [that hurdle] off the table. Here is the financial support to make this sustainable,” Gordon said.

The stratification of care under the status quo is emblematic of a larger, systemic failure within the health care industry to coordinate care efforts and consequently reduce costs while improving care quality. Rocky Mountain’s mental and physical health service integration program models the way that Obamacare has already encouraged greater coordination between separate elements of the health care industry and an emphasis on primary care.

A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health points out that — despite the fact that African-American youth drink less alcohol than youths from other racial groups — African-Americans between the ages of 12 and 20 are disproportionately exposed to greater amounts of alcohol advertising. The study’s authors note that black youth tend to consume more media, which contributes to their increased exposure, but research also suggests that alcohol advertising is specifically targeted at African-American teens.

The study notes that there are other factors — particularly religious commitment, ethnic identity, and socioeconomic status — that impact youths’ decision about whether or not to drink alcohol, and marketing campaigns represent just one influencer among many. However, the study’s authors do believe their findings indicate alcohol advertisers have a responsibility to exercise “restraint” in their advertising campaigns now that they know African-American teens may be more susceptible to their marketing materials:

Given higher levels of media usage among African-Americans, alcohol marketers have an obligation to avoid exposure to an at-risk population. In each advertising medium, a small number of brands deliver significantly more advertising exposure to AfricanAmerican youth than to youth in general, sometimes two to four times as much. Specific publications, radio formats, and television channels also expose African-American youth to more alcohol advertising than youth in general, and in some cases, to more alcohol advertising than African-American adults. That certain brands, channels, and formats expose African-American youth to alcohol at a rate double or more than that of all youth suggests that particular attention and action are needed from these advertisers and media.

Researchers reported that although alcohol advertising in magazines declined by nearly 20 percent overall between 2003 and 2008, black youth saw 32 percent more ads for alcohol in magazines than the general American youth population did in 2009. And they were 92 percent more likely to see ads hawking “alcopops” — sweetened alcoholic beverages that alcohol industry watchdogs say are specifically marketed to appeal more to youth. Researchers found this pattern held true for other types of media marketing as well, with African-American youth 17 percent more likely to see alcohol ads on television and 32 percent more likely to hear radio ads for hard liquor.

Despite the correlations that the study draws, it does not claim that advertisers themselves are strategically targeting black youth. “I can’t call it targeting because targeting implies intent and I can’t prove intent,” the study’s author, David Jernigan, told Fair Warning. However, Jernigan is skeptical of alcohol advertisers’ claims that they have no control over whether teens end up seeing marketing materials that are primarily intended for adult eyes. “The industry knows quite precisely what they are doing,” Jernigan said.

Of the least-insured metropolitan areas in the United States, seven of the top ten fall in states where the Governor has refused to accept the expansion of the Medicaid program offered up under Obamacare.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) have all said expressly that their states will not allow the expansion to take effect — despite the fact that it would offer afforable health care to citizens up to 133 percent of the poverty line who are currently uninsured and who often rely on the emergency room for their only care, racking up costs for taxpayers. But their states have some of the highest level of uninsured people overall, and are host to the least-insured American cities:

The expansion of Medicaid is actually beneficial to the states that implement it. Aside from the obvious benefit of helping more Americans stay healthy, it is projected to save states money by cutting down on the public expenses of unexpected hospital visits by sick uninsured people. And support for the expansion is wide; doctors and hospital officials believe it will hugely benefit them by taking away the burden of sudden urgent care.

The Governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval (R), has not yet committed to expanding the Medicaid program in his state. California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), on the other hand, has indicated his state will participate in the expansion.