A large study examined the impact of growth in Medicare's hospice benefit among nursing home residents between 2004 and 2009 and found improvement in indicators of care quality, such as less reliance on intensive care and feeding tubes, but that came with increased costs to Medicare of $6,761 per patient on average.

Early in the history of the Medicare hospice benefit, care was most likely to be provided by non-profit organizations, and that was how politicians sold the Medicare expansion to taxpayers - that hospice growth would save Medicare money by reducing expensive, aggressive end-of-life treatments such as hospital intensive care, because groups did it out of compassion. But once a lot of government money is involved, things change.

Many of us take a healthy immune system for granted. But for certain infants with rare, inherited mutations of certain genes, severe infection and death are stark consequences of their impaired immune responses.

Now, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have identified an important role for calcium signaling in immune responses to chronic infection resulting from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium causing tuberculosis. 

A new analysis of water and other elements contained in olivine-rich basalt samples gathered from cinder cone volcanoes that surround Lassen Peak in Northern California, at the southern edge of the Cascade chain, shows water is key for how magma forms deep underground and produces explosive volcanoes in the Cascade Range.

A new study and a new microbe provides a new understanding of how, billions of years ago, the complex cell types that comprise plants, fungi, but also animals and humans, evolved from simple microbes, according to a new paper.

Cells are the basic building blocks of all life on our planet. Yet, whereas the cells of bacteria and other microbes are small and simple, all visible life, including us humans, is generally made up of large and complex cell types.

The origin of these complex cell types has long been a mystery to the scientific community, but now researchers writing in Nature detail discovery of a new group of microorganisms that represents a missing link in the evolutionary transition from simple to complex cells.

New data from the spacecraft that orbited Mercury for four years before crashing into the planet a week ago reveals Mercury's magnetic field is almost four billion years old. The discovery helps scientists piece together the history of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun and one about which we knew very little before MESSENGER. 

NASA's MESSENGER probe left Earth in 2004, reached Mercury in 2008 and has orbited the planet since 2011, sending data back .  Researchers used data obtained by MESSENGER in the fall of 2014 and 2015 when the probe flew incredibly close to the planet's surface - at altitudes as low as 15 kilometers, and a new study detailing the planet's ancient magnetic field was published in Science Express.

Generic drugs are the same as a name brand. The only difference is that a generic company does not research or clinical trials and since the product is outside patent, they only have the cost of manufacturing, so costs are lower and the product is cheaper.

Yet we are increasingly in a precautionary principle world, in everything from vaccines to food, so it is little surprise that patients prefer name brand drugs more. Though large pharmaceutical companies are being attacked in a culture war, they are still considered more trustworthy than a generic, which most people equate with lower quality materials.