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One of the controversial topics that spawned proposals for health care reform is the issue of how wasteful the U.S. health care system is. According to a report made by Thomson Reuters, a U.S. based-information company, an amount between $505 and $850 billion is wasted in the current system annually.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have completely decoded the genes of a cancer sufferer and discovered several mutations that may have caused the development of the fatal disease.

The results, published in the journal, Nature, stated that cells which were donated by a woman in her 50s – who subsequently died of leukemia – were studied by the researchers in order to help map the characteristics of the specific DNA of the cancer sufferer.

The economic recession continues to harm every aspect of life including the health care services that many Americans with and without insurance rely on. The "safety nets" of the health care system, such as community health centers and health departments, as well as public hospitals, are seeing more patients than ever before. On the other hand, requests for life insurance quotes in a recession generally go up, according to InsWeb.

The recession being as it is, many Americans have to lay off their own workers because they don't have the funding to pay for their insurance. Additionally, health care centers rely on charitable donations, which have dwindled as the economy has gotten worse and worse.

There are only a handful of states that require drug manufacturers to disclose the payments they make to doctors and other healthcare providers every year. Many of the states that otherwise require this disclosure also feature a provision that allows the companies to declare their payments as trade secrets so that the state can’t disclose to the public.

California has one of the nation’s largest populations of non-English speaking residents, possibly only second to New York or Miami. For these people, going to the doctor or pharmacist has been a nightmare. Without being able to get their message across, some patients have actually been given the wrong medications or been misdiagnosed, simply because they could not be understood.

Many women’s health activists are happy about Barack Obama’s recent election victory, hoping that he’ll reverse at least some of the health policies put in place by the Bush administration.