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Daily Rounds: Shaken Baby Revisited; Mr. Mandate; Center For Primary Care; And More

New Evidence In High Profile Shaken Baby Case (NPR) — "The new report by the pathologist, James Ribe, details eight "diagnostic problems" with the coroner's 1996 ruling that the child had died from violent shaking or a forceful blow to the head. Ribe wrote that he saw little evidence that the infant had been attacked, noting "the complete absence of bodily trauma, such as face trauma, grab marks, bruises, rib fractures, or neck trauma." The woman convicted of second-degree murder in the case, Shirley Ree Smith, has garnered national attention over the course of a long legal campaign to clear her name. Smith insists that she never harmed the infant, Etzel Glass, who died in an apartment in Van Nuys, Calif."

Mr. Health Care Mandate (The New York Times) — “As soon as I started reading the dispatches my stomach started churning,” Mr. Gruber said of the arguments on Tuesday, while taking a break from quizzing his son for a biology test. “Losing the mandate means continuing with our unfair individual insurance markets in a world where employer-based insurance is rapidly disappearing.” Mr. Gruber, 46, hates traveling without his wife and three children, so he is tracking the case from his home in Lexington, Mass. There he crunches numbers and advises other states on health care, in between headbanging at Van Halen concerts with his 15-year-old son and cuddling with the family’s eight parrots. (His wife, Andrea, volunteers at a bird rescue center.) If the court rules against the mandate, Mr. Gruber says he believes the number of newly insured Americans could fall to eight million from the projected 32 million. He insists that without a mandate, the law will result in a terrible spiral: only relatively sick Americans will choose to get insurance, leading premium prices to rise and causing the healthier of even those sick people to drop their insurance, sending prices higher and higher."

Don't Blame Verelli For Supreme Court Health Care Stumble (The Daily Beast) — "Had the government more squarely attacked the challengers' framing of the case months ago, it would have been much clearer to everyone why this case is not at all about a fundamental change in the relationship of individual to government. Fighting on this more favorable terrain, the government also could have better exploited the fact that the law’s opponents ultimately conceded that the mandate would be constitutional if Congress just called it a tax (or tax credit), or if it had been imposed by a state. It is hard to assert that “this mandate fundamentally alters the relationship of individual to government” and at the same time admit that “it would all be hunky dory if the mandate either used different language or was adopted by states.”

Harvard Medical School Opens Center For Primary Care (The Boston Globe) — '"The money will help the hospitals redesign their curriculum so that residents train as part of small primary care teams, rather than see patients in a clinic one afternoon a week, largely on their own. This change is part of the strategy to make the fields of internal medicine, family practice, and pediatrics more attractive to new doctors. “Residents don’t want to do primary care because it’s so solitary,’’ Phillips said. He said that most practices also plan to hire nurse care managers to help residents coordinate care for the most complex patients. “Caring for these patients by themselves often feels overwhelming, and getting help from experienced nurses will make caring for these patients more manageable for residents, and also result in better outcomes for our patients,’’ Phillips said.'

This program aired on March 29, 2012. The audio for this program is not available.

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