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The New York Times reports that Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell (D) is proposing to raise the state’s individual income tax from 3.07 percent to 3.57 percent for three years, after which it will drop back down to today’s levels. Rendell justified this increase by stating that Pennsylvania has the second-lowest income tax among the 41 [...]

By MERRILL GOOZNER Merrill Goozner has been writing about economics and health care for many years. The former chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Merrill has written for a long list of publications including the New York Times, The…

The FDA has been accused of being a “black box,” Commissioner Margaret Hamburg says.

The FDA is pushing to provide more “transparency” to the public on how and why it makes decisions. For now, though, it’s not shedding a lot of light on what it’s likely to be more open about.
The agency for years has been [...]

The hospital industry is starting to push back against a move in Congress to create stricter rules for how much charity care nonprofit hospitals have to provide to earn their tax exemption.
“Ask your senators to oppose charity care proposal,” the American Hospital Association wrote in a recent bulletin to its members, the New York Times [...]

George Tiller, a gynecologist who performed late-term abortions, was shot dead at his church in Kansas on Sunday. A suspect is being held in the case.
Tiller’s willingness to perform abortions later in the course of pregnancy than many other physicians made him the object of years of protests and legal threats. In 1993, this morning’s [...]

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI That was the headline in Thursday’s New York Times regarding Monday’s promise by health care stakeholders to reduce spending by $2 trillion. A couple of snipets from the Times article: Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that…

Genetic testing for patients getting the blood-thinner warfarin gained credibility when the FDA said a couple of years back that patients with variations in two genes “may need lower warfarin doses than people without these variations.”
It was a big deal, we noted at the time, because warfarin, while very effective, can cause excess bleeding, [...]

Abraham Verghese will be answering your questions at my next live Q&A.
Dr. Verghese, a Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of the most accomplished and admired physician educators today. His pieces have appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, [...]

Epidemiology is full of detective stories, and this morning’s papers tell some of the tales that surround the first days of the current outbreak. Here are a few that caught our eye.
This WSJ narrative opens with Mexico’s health minister grabbing a red-phone hotline to the country’s president. “Mr. President, I need to see you urgently. [...]

The following is a reader take by Rahul Parikh.Where is the line between true and false advertising? And should we be more careful when the claims an ad makes has potential health consequences for children and communities?
Let’s ask newspapers that question about big adverts they’ve printed from Generation Rescue, an autism advocacy group, the [...]