The health-care-reform bill the U.S. House of Representatives will debate when it returns from recess next month contains a provision that would have Medicare reimburse doctors for counseling patients on end-of-life care every five years. Opponents of health-care reform have latched onto the provision, claiming it would lead to forced euthanasia or "death panels" to decide whether lifesaving care for the elderly is cost-effective — despite the fact that the bill says nothing about either of these ...

U.S. Army specialist Ethan McCord was one of the first on the scene when a group of suspected insurgents was blown up on a Baghdad street in 2007, hit by 30-mm bursts from an Apache helicopter. "The top of one guy's head was completely off," he recalls. "Another guy was ripped open from groin to neck. A third had lost a leg ... Their insides were out and exposed. I'd never seen anything like this before." Then McCord heard a ...

Food, of course, is a necessary ingredient for good health. But is it more than that? Can eating the right foods in the right combination actually prevent disease? In the past few years, research on the subject has exploded. Scientists have started to identify what may be hundreds--even thousands--of natural chemicals in foods that seem to have preventive powers. These aren't just vitamins and minerals but a whole new bouquet of strange-sounding compounds--starting with the latest nutritional superstars, the phytochemicals. ...

Correction Appended: Aug. 4, 2009 As the House and Senate prepare to embark on their summer recess without having passed any health-care-reform bills, President Obama's dreams of radically restructuring the system have, at least for now, bumped up against the reality of Washington politics. But even if Congress manages to overcome the many obstacles and pass some kind of meaningful reform this fall, the goal of covering some 50 million currently uninsured Americans will encounter a whole new ...

The economy may be troubled, but one area is thriving: social media. They begin with Facebook and extend through a dizzying array of companies that barely existed five years ago: Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Yammer, Yelp, Flickr, Ning, Digg--and the list goes on. These companies are mostly private but have attracted the ardent attention of Wall Street and investors, with Facebook now worth a purported $75 billion and Groupon valued at close to $25 billion. There can be little doubt that ...

Both inside and outside the U.S. Supreme Court last week, the endless argument over abortion came to a critical confrontation. Outside there was a | raucous standoff on the courthouse steps and plaza, where some 200 demonstrators, pro and con, sang, chanted and shouted. Inside, where the noise could not penetrate, the nine Justices were assembled to hear arguments in William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a case that could leave in tatters the pivotal Roe v. Wade decision ...

The imposing marble-and-mahogany chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court seems too stately a place for dropping a political bombshell. Yet last week, while opposing bands of demonstrators taunted each other with noisy chants and protest signs on the plaza in front of the court, that is precisely what happened. Seven of the nine Justices emerged from behind the red velvet curtain and took their seats. In the hushed chamber, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist read in his singsong, quivering voice ...

Correction Appended: Aug. 31, 2010 One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking. But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: ...

Max Baucus, the Senate's point man on health care, sounds supremely confident when he talks about the odds that Congress will pass its most sweeping piece of social legislation since the New Deal. "Meaningful, comprehensive health-care legislation passes this year. That's a given," he declares, sipping a bottle of water in his functionally furnished hideaway office just steps from the Senate chamber. "It's gonna pass. It's gonna happen. There's no doubt about it." The rest of us might ...

In recent weeks, opponents of Barack Obama's health-care-reform plans have criticized Britain's National Health Service in an effort to counter the President's proposals for greater government involvement in health care. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa suggested that his Democratic colleague Edward Kennedy would have been left to die in Britain because doctors would have refused the 77-year-old treatment for his brain tumor, and former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in an article that ...