Child health insurance bill faces veto
Sun, 15 Jul 2007 08:40:35 GMTBy KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said Saturday that senior advisers would recommend the president veto Senate legislation that would substantially increase funds for children's health insurance.
The legislation calls for a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes. The revenue would be used to subsidize health insurance for children and some adults with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford insurance on their own. Members of the Senate Finance Committee brokered a bipartisan agreement Friday that would add $35 billion to the program over the next five years. The Bush administration had instead recommend $5 billion.
The Senate legislation expands the State Children's Health Insurance Program beyond the original intent of the program, said White House Spokesman Tony Fratto.
"It's clear that it will have the effect of encouraging many to drop private coverage — purchased either through their employer or with their own resources — to go on the government-subsidized program," Fratto said. "Tax increases are neither necessary nor advisable to appropriately fund SCHIP."
Congress is considering renewing the program before it expires Sept. 30. When Congress approved the program in 1997, it provided $40 billion over 10 years. States use the money, along with their own dollars, to subsidize the cost of health insurance. The federal government covers about 70 percent of the cost.
"Congress needs to deliver a bill the president can sign or they need to send him an extension so that people don't worry about losing their current coverage," Fratto said. "It's important that Congress understands the serious consequences of delaying this or sending the president legislation that he clearly cannot sign."
Fratto also called on the Senate Finance Committee to consider the president's recommendation to tax employees on the health insurance premiums paid by their employers. The president would offset the increased taxes by giving taxpayers a deduction or credit. The result would be a tax cut for most families, but not for those with the highest-priced insurance plans.
"We believe that these proposals would mean that as many as 20 million others who have no health insurance would purchase basic coverage," Fratto said.
Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, had called on the president Thursday to step back from veto threats of legislation that had not been finalized yet.
Grassley and Hatch said they would like to consider the president's proposals to change how tax law treats health insurance. Such changes could make insurance more affordable for many families, but now is not the time, they said.
"Not taking that on is a missed opportunity, but it's not realistic given the lack of bipartisan support," the senators said.
Grassley and Hatch were among the lawmakers that backed the agreement reached late Friday with key Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee's chairman, said the proposal would lead to more than 3 million uninsured children obtaining health coverage. But others said that estimate is high because they believe some families that would sign up for the program would have already been getting their coverage through the private sector.
CDC quarantine officers ever on watch
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 17:07:46 GMTBy CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO - A day's work for Lt. Cmdr. Rendi Murphree Bacon can mean face time with lab rats, frozen specimens or a baboon-hunting trophy. It can bring refugees from far-flung nations where the crippling polio virus has resurfaced or a traveler with a human skull souvenir.
The 40-year-old biologist with the U.S. Public Health Service is a quarantine officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at O'Hare International Airport, one of the busiest hubs in the world.
Her duties include investigating reports of illness on international flights, checking the health of arriving refugees, inspecting animal products and screening cargo. She can seize articles that lack proper permits.
Once there were hundreds of officers like her working on the front lines to prevent potential health threats from entering the U.S. Now there are fewer than 100 — a number the CDC has been rebuilding since the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the 2003 SARS outbreak.
The recent international scare involving Andrew Speaker, the Georgia lawyer with drug-resistant tuberculosis who flew to several countries before being ordered into isolation, has focused fresh attention on health threats on airlines. The quarantine order in Speaker's case was the first issued by the federal government since a patient with smallpox was isolated in 1963, according to the CDC.
CDC quarantine officers have the legal authority to detain anyone who may have cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers, SARS and pandemic flu.
In an emerging influenza pandemic, Bacon could force the hospital isolation of ill passengers — and quarantine even healthy passengers.
"In my lifetime I may never see that, which is fine with me," Bacon says.
The officers don't provide medical care themselves, leaving that to local emergency personnel.
On one recent day, Bacon greeted 35 refugees arriving from Kenya, where polio recently surfaced among Somali refugees.
"How are you feeling?" Bacon asks the crowd, with help from a Kenyan woman who spoke English. "Any sickness in your group? Welcome."
This group was healthy.
Every year, about 120 million people enter and leave the United States through 474 airports, seaports and land border crossings, according to the private Institute of Medicine.
With triumphs in public health such as the eradication of smallpox, the U.S. quarantine system shrank from 600 employees in 1953 to 70 employees in 2004. It now has 83 workers and an $11 million budget.
Last year, Bacon's office handled 311 reports of illness on international flights. It also helped with 14 investigations that involved tracking down passengers who sat near people whose illnesses arose after their flights.
The staff monitored 7,356 refugees and cleared paperwork on 10,125 dogs, 1,767 cats, 4,520 rodents and one turtle.
"There's an art in what they do," says Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "This is detective work at the highest level."
The international effort to track SARS cases turned a spotlight on the system's inadequacies, including underfunding and a lack of medically trained officers, says Benjamin, who led a 2005 Institute of Medicine study on the issue.
Significant progress has been made since then, Benjamin says. But no matter how much money is allocated to the quarantine system, he says, the speed of air travel outpaces the incubation period of many diseases — meaning a contagious person can cause an outbreak without so much as a warning sniffle aboard a plane.
In her leisure hours, Bacon is reading "The Great Influenza," the account of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.
"We've allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to a repeat of the 1918 influenza because we take our good health for granted," she says.
She's never bored. Recently she fielded a question from another airport about a man who wanted to enter the country with his own amputated leg bone. She learned that the leg was amputated 17 years ago in a hospital because of an injury.
She reasoned that any hospital would have incinerated the limb if the man had an infectious disease. And time made a difference.
"Those germs would have been long dead with 17 years of drying. So we allowed him to bring his bone in," she says. "I tell you, there's stuff like that all the time."
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On the Net:
CDC Quarantine: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dq/
AIDS case deal may forgive Libyan debt
Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:58:57 GMTBy KHALED EL-DEEB, Associated Press Writer
TRIPOLI, Libya - Several eastern European countries would forgive Libyan debt dating back to the Cold War under a proposal to compensate families whose children were allegedly infected with the AIDS virus by five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, a victims' advocate said Saturday.
The six foreign medics have been sentenced to death in the case, and Libyan officials have said a settlement could pave the way for their release.
Jailed since 1999, the six deny having infected more than 400 children and say their confessions were extracted under torture. Experts and outside scientific reports have said the children were contaminated as a result of unhygienic conditions at a hospital in the northeastern coastal city of Benghazi. Fifty of the infected children died.
Libya's Supreme Court upheld the death sentences for the medics in an appeal ruling on Wednesday. But that decision could still be overturned by country's highest judicial authority, the Supreme Judiciary Council, which is set to review the case on Monday. The council could approve or reject the convictions or set lighter sentences.
Idriss Lagha, head of the Association for the Families of HIV-Infected Children, told The Associated Press that a settlement was being finalized involving the transfer of money to a fund through the remission of debt to Bulgaria and several other eastern European countries.
Seif al Islam, the son of longtime Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, told a French newspaper published on Saturday that $400 million in compensation would be paid to the families.
"The indemnities are financed by international contributions in the form of debt remission," the newspaper Le Figaro ed him as saying. "The concerned countries are Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic."
An agreement on the case has "not yet been reached" with the European Union, said Seif al Islam, who heads a powerful Libyan association that has worked to resolve the deadlock.
Government officials from Bulgaria and other nations reportedly involved in the deal have all denied they were sending cash to the families.
Le Figaro, without citing sources, reported that each family would get $1 million.
Companies in the four countries are all owed money from Libya largely dating back to the communist era. Bulgaria says Libya owes it $290 million, and the Czech news agency CTK put the Libyan debt to Prague at about $300 million in 2002.
The spokeswoman for Slovakia's ruling party said Saturday that Prime Minister Robert Fico had discussed with Libyan officials in February the possibility of using some of the country's debt to compensate the families.
Katarina Klizanova Rysova said negotiations between the two countries were still under way, but any deal would require Libya to eventually repay the debt.
"Slovakia can provide the finances for the Libyan families only on condition that the debt is paid off," she said.
Rysova said Libyan debt to her country was about $130 million, but the final sum was still being negotiated.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin reiterated Friday that Bulgaria would not pay compensations because that would imply the medics were guilty. But he also said he was optimistic a settlement was close that could result in the medics being pardoned.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman was not immediately available for comment Saturday.
Czech Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zuzana Opletalova said the medics' case "is not over yet and it is premature to speak about any compensation."
The Czech Finance Ministry would not comment.
The Libyan government is under intense international pressure to free the medics. The case has become a sticking point in the regime's attempts to rebuild ties with the United States and European countries.
Libyan officials have said the families' acceptance of a compensation settlement is key to resolving the deadlock and would allow the death sentence to be withdrawn.
Often referred to as "blood money," compensation for death or suffering is a legal provision in the traditional Islamic code in the Middle East and North Africa.
