I have the pleasure of hosting this week's Health Wonk Review. For those unfamiliar with the HWR, it's a biweekly roundup of interesting posts on health care policy and polity.

Come on by!

Coming soon to a classroom (or physician's office) near you?

"They look like happy, healthy children - and that is exactly what they are ... Yesterday their parents told how they were sent letters which began with the stark warning: 'Your child is overweight for their age and sex."

In the run-up to ObamaCare©, we were promised that abortions would not be covered. This made sense, since they're not medically necessary procedures, and because this would constitute an end-run around the Hyde Amendment. It will come as no surprise, though, that the folks in charge of implementing this train wreck believe that abortion should be covered, so now that particular promise has been thrown under the bus:

The last time we discussed Alzheimer's, we learned that a few cups o' joe may hold a key towards preventing the dread disease. Now comes word that we may be closer to predicting whether or not we're at risk for it:

It appeared that the perennial "Doc Fix" was scuttled, but that appears to have been premature:

"After a week of partisan wrangling, the Senate on Friday passed legislation to spare doctors a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments looming for months. But the last-ditch effort came too late."

Maybe Archie Bunker had it right all along:

"Meat and potato diet 'reduces risk of lung cancer by half"

Turns out, there's a vitamin, present in high doses in foods like meat and potatoes, fish and even whole grains that can have a profound effect in reducing the risk of lung cancer.

Even among smokers!

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I was involved in a pretty bad auto accident. A young lady who wasn't paying attention thought she could beat a light, and - both cars travelling about 45 miles per hour - we collided almost head-on. Both cars were totalled.

We both walked away.

Undoubtedly, the fact that both vehicles were roughly the same size and weight helped, but I credit the fact that we were both wearing seat and shoulder belts as the primary reason we lived, let alone walked away with nary a scratch.

That's the latest guesstimate from the Congressional Budget Office on how much more ObamaCare© will really cost:

"The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought."

Right-brainers take note: this is what $1 Billion in crisp new $100 bills looks like:

Two seemingly disparate items hit my radar simultaneously, and I wondered if there wasn't some "connection" between them. It really wasn't difficult to find, but that seemed to raise as many questions as were answered.

A friend of mine recently sent me the link to a new, free program that lets you organize and store your medical info on your computer. While on-line services like Google (and others) let you centralize your personal health data, they also raise (legitimate) privacy concerns. This new program, called HeyDoc!, let's you:

A good friend's father is about to begin chemo for cancer. His oncologist's office has a special area for this, with seats for up to four patients; each treatment session lasts 4 hours.

Unbelievably, his wife is not allowed to sit with him during this physically and emotionally painful time.

Why is that, you ask?

Because she "might see other patients, which would violate their HIPAA privacy rights."

Really?