The Washington Post: "Opposition to the landmark health care overhaul declined over the past month, to 35 percent from 41 percent, according to the latest results of a tracking poll, reported Thursday...

Several Senate Republican leaders are now pushing a new, partial health-overhaul repeal bill that targets a Medicare cost-cutting panel, The Hill reports. The panel, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, would make cost-cutting recommendations whenever spending exceeds set benchmarks. Congress would have to adopt them, or come up with its own plan. "The Republican critics - Sens...

Modern Healthcare: Funding to help doctors and hospitals buy electronic medical records could begin to flow through the Medicare program as early as May 2011, a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official said Wednesday. But, the final shape of the program remains unclear as CMS works to implement 800 pages of new regulations...

AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce, said today that the AMA was pleased to hear Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, announce this morning that the Coalition's aged care policy would be released 'in the next few days'. Dr Pesce said that aged care has so far been ignored in this election campaign. "The AMA looks forward to the Coalition starting a bidding war on aged care policy," Dr Pesce said...

News outlets report on state budget gaps and lobbying for extra Medicaid funds from the federal government. Bloomberg: "U.S. state governments project revenue will climb in the current fiscal year after they raised taxes and cut spending to close budget gaps of $84 billion, a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures found...

CongressDaily: The Senate Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee approved a draft funding bill Tuesday for HHS, "moving a bill that would provide $170 billion in discretionary spending to related federal agencies, nearly $1 billion under the president's request...

AARP on Tuesday "threw its influence" behind a number of plans to reduce Medicare fraud, including the bipartisan Medicare Fraud Enforcement and Prevention Act, which would increase penalties on nabbed fraudsters and supply more claims data to enforcers, The Hill reports...

Texas-based Scott & White Healthcare has received three grants that provide education support to working nursing students, set up a senior health research center, and establish systems for treating child abuse and educating those who treat it. The three grants, totaling nearly $2 million, include: Nursing education...

Obese older adults are more likely to use walkers, canes and other mobility devices at a younger age, and may run the risk of using them incorrectly, according to new research from Purdue University. "Baby Boomers are coming of age and obesity is an epidemic for this population as well," said Karis Pressler, a doctoral student in sociology and gerontology and the project's lead author...

Researchers watched two groups of mice, both nearing the end of a two-day fast. One group was quietly huddled together, but the other group was active and alert. The difference? The second set of mice had been engineered so their brains produced more SIRT1, a protein known to play a role in aging and longevity...

As hospital and clinical laboratories endure increasingly intense pressures to do more with less, they now face another challenge - rising demand for medical tests driven by an aging U.S. population that is expected to swell to more than 70 million in the next 20 years, an increase of more than 80 percent from today...

The Hill: "The majority of the nation's seniors have little understanding of what the Democrats' newly enacted healthcare law actually does, according to poll results released Monday...

Older Australians are demanding commitments to world class care, financial security, support for mature age workers and an end to ageism from both sides of politics in the lead up to the federal election...

A new study from the US suggests that social interaction should be considered an important factor for extending lifespan, on a par with other health and lifestyle factors, to the extent that low social interaction harms longevity as much as alcoholism and smoking, has more impact than lack of exercise, and is twice as harmful as obesity...

Thanks to rising obesity rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, elderly people there are becoming more likely to suffer from disabilities, according to a paper recently published by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers in the American Journal of Epidemiology...

Reform Eases Long-Term Health Care Woes The San Francisco Chronicle Our system of long-term care does not provide adequate or coordinated human services and medical treatment for our growing aging population. ... Thanks to a provision of the new health care law known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, tomorrow's continuum of care does not have to be so unforgiving...

USA Today: "The explosive growth of the USA's older population is fueling a grass-roots 'village' movement in neighborhoods across the country to help people age in their own homes. More than 50 villages in a neighbor-helping-neighbor system have sprouted in the past decade from California and Colorado to Nebraska and Massachusetts...

Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and a new study in the August 2010 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family finds significant national differences in the degree of conflict between older parents and their adult children...

Relationships between elder and younger members of a family can be strained and positive and negative in nature, even when affection is shared. A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that long-term caretaking duties puts further strain on adult parent-child relationships...

US researchers studying yeast cells found that ageing cells able to retain a group of proteins that ferry compounds across cellular membranes and get rid of toxic waste have a longer lifespan in that they can produce more copies of themselves compared with cells that lose their waste disposal proteins; they also hope their finding may help us better understand stem cells and cancer cells...