Daily Rounds: Perry's Health Record; Factcheck On RomneyCare; Why Doctors Over-Order; Parental Roadmap

Few Bright Spots in Perry’s Health Care Record (Texas Tribune via NY Times) — "While Mr. Perry condemns both efforts to make carrying health insurance mandatory, Texas faces a staggering crisis in health coverage: the state leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents, has the third-lowest percentage of people covered by their employers and spends less per capita than all but one other state on Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program for the disabled and poor children. In the 10 years Mr. Perry has been governor, his critics say there have been few effective initiatives out of his office to increase either public or private health coverage significantly in Texas, where today an estimated 6.2 million people — one-quarter of the state’s population — are uninsured, including 1.3 million children."

FactCheck.org : Romney’s Health Care Law Killed Jobs? (factcheck.org) "The Perry campaign has been pushing a questionable claim that the Massachusetts health care law, signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, “killed 18,000 jobs.” But that number was churned out by an economic model used by a conservative think tank, and it’s unknown whether the figure is accurate...We can’t say whether or not Massachusetts businesses really chose to create 18,000 fewer jobs – or any other number – because of the law, but here’s what we can say:"

Doctor and Patient: Why Doctors Order So Many Tests - NYTimes.com (ell.blogs.nytimes.com) "The doctors surveyed attributed the pressure to overtreat patients primarily to three factors. Almost half believed that inadequate time allotted to patients led them to order more tests or refer to specialists. More than three-quarters also believed that the fear of being sued or perceived as not doing enough put undue pressure on them to order more. A doctor might, for example, order an unnecessary CT scan for a patient who had only a minor forehead bruise from a fall but a perfect neurologic exam. Most notably, more than half the doctors believed that the current quality measures and clinical guidelines endorsed by health care experts and insurers as a way to rein in excesses were in fact having the opposite effect."

Roadmap To Your Child's Brain (boston.com — Daily Dose) "Parents can have a lot of impact on their child’s developing brain — from conception through college — but not in the ways they may think. In fact, many of us do a lot of wrong things in attempting to cultivate our little geniuses IQ’s by sitting them in front of a Baby Einstein DVD, for example. And we skip some right ones, like eating fish when we’re pregnant because we’re afraid of the mercury content."