TV News LIES

Ultimately, health care seems to be the culprit in Americans' increasingly shorter lifespans. The authors investigated the impact of health insurance on mortality rates, and found that there is very little. They stated that insurance "coverage has large effects on use of health care but only small effects on mortality, which are concentrated in low-income groups."

They go on to note that only a very small difference in life expectancy can be found as a result of access to medical insurance. It should also be pointed out that these studies are looking for such a connection, so their inability to find one should be taken as highly significant.

Several large health insurers, including UnitedHealthcare and Aetna, are focusing on one of the country’s most costly diseases: cancer. The insurers have begun tightening oversight of the care provided to patients with many different types of cancer, hoping to lower expenses by experimenting with new ways to pay specialists.

UnitedHealthcare plans to announce on Wednesday a one-year project with five oncology practices, offering doctors an additional fee. The new fee is meant to encourage doctors to follow standard treatments rather than opting too often for individualized and unproven courses of therapy, which can include the most expensive drug combinations.

"As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined," concludes the study, conducted by Columbia University health policy professors Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, which will appear in the November edition of the influential peer-reviewed journal.

The noteworthy decline is highlighted by the fact that in 1999, the World Health Organization ranked the US as 24th in the world in the same category, life expectancy.

It's always entertaining when the mainstream media "discovers" something they think is new even though the natural health community has been talking about for years. The New York Times, for example, recently ran a story entitled When Drugs Cause Problems They Are Supposed to Prevent (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/h...). We've been covering the same topic for years, reporting on how chemotherapy causes cancer, osteoporosis drugs cause bone fractures and antidepressant drugs cause suicidal behavior.

The latest "new" discovery by the mainstream media is that McDonald's Happy Meal hamburgers and fries won't decompose, even if you leave them out for six months. This story has been picked up by CNN, the Washington Post and many other MSM outlets which appear startled that junk food from fast food chains won't decompose.

Women who took hormone replacement pills had more advanced breast cancers and were more likely to die from them than women who took a dummy pill, raising new concerns about the commonly prescribed drugs, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to report more breast cancer deaths among women taking hormone replacement therapy. And it contradicts prior studies that suggest women taking the drugs had less aggressive, easier-to-treat breast cancers.

For decades, factory farms have used antibiotics even in healthy animals to promote faster growth and prevent disease that could sicken livestock held in confined quarters. The benefit: cheaper, more plentiful meat for consumers.

But a firestorm has erupted over a federal proposal recommending antibiotics only when animals are actually sick. Medical and public health experts in recent years said overuse and misuse of antibiotics posed a serious public health threat by creating new strains of bacteria that are difficult to treat — both in animals and humans.