J. Larry Jameson, dean of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, was named Thursday as the next dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and head of the Penn health system.

Jameson will replace Penn’s Arthur Rubenstein, on July 1. Rubenstein, who announced his retirement as dean in March, led an unprecedented expansion of the medical faculty and facilities. He will remain at Penn.

When he assumes his new positions next year, Jameson, 56 – like Rubenstein, an endocrinologist – will oversee the enterprise known as Penn Medicine, which encompasses the medical school and the three-hospital Penn health system.

Read more.

Three weeks ago, physician Steven Brigham led a car caravan of patients from his Voorhees abortion clinic to his facility in Elkton, Md. After one of the patients was critically injured during her surgery there, Brigham put the semiconscious, bleeding woman into the back of a rented Chevrolet Malibu and drove her to a nearby hospital emergency room rather than call an ambulance.

Those details are contained in documents issued over the last 10 days by the Maryland Board of Physicians and Elkton police. The two agencies have launched a wide-ranging investigation into Brigham’s long-troubled abortion business, which he conducts in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

On Aug. 25, the Maryland Board of Physicians ordered Brigham, 54, to stop performing abortions in that state, where he has never been licensed to practice medicine. By then police had raided Brigham’s Elkton facility – from which they said they removed 35 “late-term fetuses and fetal parts” – as well as the Voorhees headquarters of his chain of 15 clinics, which does business as American Women’s Services.

Maryland authorities seek missing medical records, and are looking into Brigham’s habit of sending late-term patients across state lines after initiating their abortions in Voorhees.

Read more.

The price of family health insurance didn’t go up all that much last year, but most people who get their insurance through work would never know that.

As premiums rose 3 percent, employers kept their contribution flat while upping the worker share by 14 percent, according to an annual survey released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Education Trust, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association.

That doesn’t include the costs workers have to pay when they need to see a doctor. Those went up, too. Twenty-seven percent of workers now have annual deductibles of at least $1,000, up from 22 percent in 2009. Such high-deductible plans are far more common in small companies. Co-payments also went up.

During a conference call on the report, Drew Altman, Kaiser’s president and chief executive officer, said he expected the trend of rising burdens for employees to continue. Eventually, he said, that can become a financial hardship and a barrier to care.

Read more.

In a year when news about Alzheimer’s disease seems to whipsaw between encouraging and disheartening, a new discovery by an 84-year-old scientist has illuminated a new direction

…

The finding, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, reveals a new potential drug target that, according to the prevailing hypothesis of the genesis of Alzheimer’s, could slow or halt the devastating effects of this now untreatable disease.

The work involves laboratory experiments and studies with mice — it is far from ready for the doctor’s office. But researchers, still reeling from the announcement two weeks ago by Eli Lilly that its experimental drug turned out to make Alzheimer’s worse, not better, were encouraged.

“This really is a new approach,” said Dr. Paul Aisen, of the University of California, San Diego. “The work is very strong, and it is very convincing.”

43 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Federal law, while 45 percent have an unfavorable opinion, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

About 43 percent of Americans favor the landmark law, while 45 percent view it unfavorably, the survey found. The public perception improved slightly from the summer but has since then fallen to its May level.

The survey found that Americans are split on how the new health care law would impact them: Twenty-nine percent thought they would be better off under the new law — a new low in Kaiser’s polling since February 2009 — while 30 percent expected to be worse off. Fifty-one of those polled said they were disappointed in the health care law.

Democrats had hoped to turn the negative impressions that arose during health care discussions earlier this year into positive momentum, going into November’s general election. But that has yet to be the case.

Learn more.