Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Save the Trees, We’ll Save Your Life

September 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Kinari and Campbell Webb

IN JULY 2011, about a week before I landed in Western Borneo, a local man sent an ominous text message to his boss from deep within the jungle. For more than 10 years, this man had worked as a research assistant at the Cabang Panti Research Station, in the core of Gunung Palung National Park, a mountainous wilderness that contains some of Indonesia’s last lowland rain forest and remains a stronghold for orangutans, gibbons, and other primates. Like many protected areas in the developing world, Gunung Palung’s boundaries were poorly enforced, and the people from the hardscrabble communities ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Health, September-October 2012
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Mexico Now Has Universal Health Care

August 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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As the contenders and seconds in the United States’ presidential duel continue slapping each others’ cheeks with allegations about who loves Medicare more, Mexico has quietly (at least in decibels heard north of the border) achieved universal health coverage for all of its citizens. That Mexico could join Canada, Britain, or Israel, among others, in providing for all of its citizens may seem especially remarkable given the country’s frequent one-dimensional depiction as a dystopian narco-state. And of course, coverage isn’t equivalent to care. Mexico’s health system isn’t ... Read More

More like this: Health, The 101
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Will Obamacare Ruling Swing Public Opinion? History Says It May.

June 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Democrats and Republicans are furiously trying to rally public opinion to their respective sides, following the Supreme Court ruling that largely upheld the Affordable Care Act as constitutional. The intense political maneuvering raises a key question: Does this sort of definitive legal decision influence voters’ views on the issue at hand? One very high-profile example—the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which effectively legalized abortion—suggests the answer is yes. At least, that’s the conclusion of a recently published study, which finds the court’s action appears to have ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Health, Legal Affairs
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Obamacare Wins—Yet Single Payer Refuses to Die

June 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Health Care Law Upheld

Even though public debate over American health care policy has been trapped in legal limbo, research into the nuts and bolts of fixing American health care has never gone away—and, in fact, has evolved in strange new directions. In at least one case, a major health care provider has concluded that a single payer system was viable at the state level. In late March, a study by the Lewin Group, a research subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, the country’s biggest health insurance provider, found that a broad single-payer plan would save the state of Minnesota $189.5 billion from 2014 to 2023, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings, Health, Uncategorized
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Mammograms: The Year of Living Dangerously?

June 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Abstract graphic representation of breast cancer screening

MY 65-YEAR-OLD MOTHER’S BREAST CANCER was detected after a routine annual mammogram. In the weeks after diagnosis, we were ushered in to see radiologists, a medical oncologist, a surgical oncologist, the insurance liaison, and more nurses than I could count. They all smiled reassuringly and told my mother something resembling, “The good news is that we caught it early!” Those words were a comfort. “Early detection” has become a rallying cry for women, breast cancer survivors, and supporters alike, across the United States and beyond. As breast cancer has evolved into one of the ... Read More

More like this: Health, July-August 2012
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Is It Worth Paying People to Be Healthy?

April 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The Supreme Court spent a significant share of last week’s oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act debating the role of money in public health. Can the government rightly fine people for not buying health-care coverage? And what happens if such rebels face no penalty? Would we all, as a result, wind up less healthy? This line of thinking — the fine as a stick used to punish people who won’t get health care — isn’t the only potential contribution of money on public well being. Health researchers and behavioral economists are increasingly pondering the reverse: cash as carrot. ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Can the Supreme Court Survive a Health-Care Decision?

March 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Partisanship and Support for the U.S. Supreme Court

Legitimacy is for losers. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will announce one of its most important decisions since its ruling in Bush v. Gore. The decision in the cases — all having to do with the constitutionality of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — likely will have vast political consequences, perhaps well beyond health care itself. The court will also decide a number of other blockbuster cases in 2012, from the highly polarized Arizona immigration legislation (whether people can be stopped by the police and interrogated about their immigration status) to the question of ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs
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Global Fistula Care Map Aims to Expand Treatment

February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Global Fistula Care Map

There are many dire medical problems that the first world has the luxury of not worrying much about. Such as obstetric fistula, which tears a hole inside the birth canal. It’s one of the most devastating birth injuries a woman can sustain, but treatable. But that’s often not the case for much of the developing world. There are between 50,000-100,000 cases of obstetric fistula each year worldwide. In 2010, only an estimated 14,000 were treated. Obstetric fistula causes 8 percent of all maternal deaths and, when it’s not fatal, leads to constant incontinence and shame. As we explained ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Health
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Where Have All the Doctors Gone?

January 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Technically, all Judy Sweet needs is a blood pressure test. In most doctors’ offices, this would be an in-and-out visit. Sweet’s doctor, however, never rushes her patients. Mary Elizabeth Sokach is a primary-care provider based in Exeter Township, a rural Pennsylvania community about 15 miles west of Scranton. When Sokach walks into the room, she greets Sweet like an old friend, then examines her closely. She asks when Sweet last had an eye exam. (“She’s a phenomenal artist, so we have to keep her hands and her vision going,” explains Sokach.) And she talks to Sweet about sleep and ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2012, Magazine Feature Story
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Placebo Effect Stronger Than We Thought?

January 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In July 2001, the Amgen Corporation announced the failure, in a second-stage clinical trial, of an experimental drug to treat Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness that affects nerve cells in the brain. Such a failure was hardly unusual; only a minority of the drugs that undergo trials make it to the marketplace. But for Perry Cohen, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years before, at age 50, the announcement brought both surprise and disappointment. Cohen, an MIT-trained PhD who had spent decades advising health-care organizations on how to evaluate medical care, had ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2012, Magazine Feature Story
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