Barack Obama announced yesterday that Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and a prominent member of Obama's campaign, would be selected as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As the New York Times'  David D. Kirkpatrick reports, Daschle's appointment appears to violate Obama's rule not to select people ...

The New York Times' Robert Pear reports that the Dept. of Health and Human Services lost in federal court over a new policy that enable the Dept's Center for Medicare Services to deliver only the least expensive type of a drug to a medicare patient. For example, HHS only ...

The New York Times Charles Duhigg reports that the Center for Medicare Services blew $2.8 billion last year on medical equipment like wheelchairs that were fraudulently requested. The culprit is apparently sneaky equipment sellers who forge doctor's signatures and get Medicare to pay them to provide medical equipment to ...

The Centers for Disease Control announced this week that 56,300 people in the U.S. have AIDS, a significantly higher figure than the 40,000 people previously estimated. The Wall Street Journal's Marilyn Chase flags that the racial disparity in who gets AIDS is more stark ...

The Washington Post's Annys Shin reports that the Food and Drug Administration found a jalapeno pepper in McAllen, Texas that has bacteria which can cause salmonella. The contaminated pepper was made in Mexico and sold by the small Texas company, Agricola Zaragosa. In May, the FDA warned that ...

I got an e-mail from a friend about a problem in Atlanta -- seems the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost power and their backup generator didn't work.  It happened to be at a lab where the CDC stores and studies highly dangerous viruses such as the H5N1 flu ...

Given the lobbying power of the American Medical Association and the unimpeachable importance of their clients' work, It's perhaps impolitic to suggest that doctors make too much money. But what about dead doctors?

The New York Times' Robert Pear summarizes a report from a Senate subcommittee that between 2000-07 anywhere ...

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reports that a former top Environmental Protection Agency official said Vice-President Cheney's office manipulated Congressional testimony. The White House did so to play down the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming. The Vice-President's office, and the Council of Environmental Quality, allegedly took out ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are off tomatoes and onto jalapeno peppers as the possible source of a recent salmonella outbreak traced to Mexican restaurants, as Jane Zhang and Janet Adamy write in the Wall Street Journal.  Every day that they can't find the answer is a day for critics of government to rehearse their usual refrains.  The easiest thing is to charge incompetence:  Why can't those government people find the problem?  What is wrong with these people?  Business are losing money -- everyone pities the tomato growers who have, it turns out, been "unfairly charged" and have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars."  But consider the alternative -- what if the CDC was doing nothing?

Want to know how Washington works? Pay close attention to the rest of the Bush administration and see if the Food and Drug Administration gets the $275 million extra it’s requesting. The New York Times’ Gardiner Harris reports that no less of an authority than Dept. of Health and ...