Medicine & Health

McBride”We are headed into a time when a confluence of changes are going to lead to a perfect storm, making us finally realize that our health care system needs a major overhaul,” says Timothy D. McBride, Ph.D., leading health economist and professor of social work. McBride is available to discuss candidates’ health care plans and universal health care.

McBride”The problems with Social Security can be solved easily compared to those of Medicare,” says Timothy McBride, leading health economist and associate dean for public health. “Social Security can be fixed right now, although most people don’t want to solve it with tax hikes. We cannot solve Medicare as easily. Medicare is in a serious crisis relative to Social Security,” he says. McBride is available to discuss Social Security and Medicare.

BernsteinAccess to affordable health care has been a recurring topic in current political discussions. Merton C. Bernstein, leading health insurance expert and law professor emeritus says that Medicare is the most practical platform for both extending coverage to everyone and taming medical cost inflation. He is available to discuss the candidates’ health care proposals.

“The problems with Social Security can be solved easily compared to those of Medicare,” says Timothy McBride, leading health economist and associate dean for public health at Washington University in St. Louis. “Social Security can be fixed right now, although most people don’t want to solve it with tax hikes. If passed today, a one-percentage point tax increase on both employers and employees could solve the Social Security problem for 75 years. If we don’t want to raise taxes, another option is to cut benefits by a similar amount and we’re done.” McBride says that the tax increase needed to fix Medicare would be six or seven percentage points in the long run. “We cannot solve Medicare as easily. Medicare is in a serious crisis relative to Social Security,” he says. McBride believes that as soon as the next President is elected “we will hear that we need to solve Medicare and Medicaid.”

Washington University faculty physicians have assumed responsibility for providing medical care in the Emergency Department at Barnes-Jewish West County Hospital. The addition of Washington University emergency medicine physicians continues the enhancement of clinical services at Barnes-Jewish West County Hospital.

Van HareGeorge Van Hare, M.D., has been appointed director of the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at the School of Medicine and the Louis Larrick Ward Chair in Pediatric Cardiology at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

A narrow region on chromosome 15 contains genetic variations strongly associated with familial lung cancer, says a study conducted by scientists at the School of Medicine and other institutions. The researchers found a more than five times higher risk of lung cancer for people who have both a family history of the disease and these genetic variations. The risk was not affected by whether the study participants smoked or didn’t smoke.

BernsteinAccess to affordable health care has been a recurring topic in current political discussions. Merton C. Bernstein, leading health insurance expert and law professor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis says that Medicare is the most practical platform for both extending coverage to everyone and taming medical cost inflation. He is available to discuss the candidates’ health care proposals.

Scientists at the School of Medicine, working as part of a large-scale federally funded research collaboration, have discovered new genetic mutations and molecular pathways underlying glioblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer and the most aggressive.

Researchers have found a potential new approach to treating endometrial cancer — a drug that was shown to be effective even against human endometrial cancer cell lines that tend to be treatment resistant. Scientists at the School of Medicine and the Translational Genomics Research Institute discovered that introducing a particular inhibitor drug can turn off cell receptors that are responsible for tumor growth.