WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dying of cancer, Thomas Amschwand did everything he was told to make sure his wife would collect on the life insurance policy he had through his employer.

"He was obsessed with dotting every `i' and crossing every `t'," Melissa Amschwand-Bellinger recalled about her husband, who died in 2001 at age 30.

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I was searching for the text of a BBC America World News Report that aired tonight, when I came across this story about the Oregon healthcare lottery (BBC News, March, 2008). There were no search results on empowHer.com, so I'm sharing this interesting news with you.

In my work as an elder care advocate I am often asked to recommend a physician and frequently hear the challenges families face with finding the right physician for their needs. Until my late twenties I did not have a primary care physician (PCP) who I saw on a regular basis. I religiously kept my well women visits with my Ob-Gyn, but never with a PCP. I was one of those women who never got sick, lived at the gym, and had a youthful metabolism that allowed me to love my skinny black dress and ice cream. Why did I need a primary care physician?

Timmi Ryerson, a San Diego stock market analyst, says her left hip actually works again, thanks to an orthopedic specialist in India.

Stacie Mason, a civil rights worker from West Virginia, couldn’t fully appreciate her 170-pound weight loss until a plastic surgeon in Panama removed 20 inches of excess skin from her stomach and back.

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WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Monday it is freezing a scheduled 10 percent fee cut for doctors who treat Medicare patients, giving Congress time to act to prevent the cuts when lawmakers return from a July 4 recess.

Physicians have been running ads hinting that as a result of the cuts, patients may find doctors less willing to treat them. The administration's delay in implementing the cuts spares lawmakers from having to use the recess to explain to seniors why they didn't do the job before leaving town.

The Wall Street Journal has a great article out about how to keep your health insurance if you wind up losing your job.

Here’s what they recommend.

Your spouse’s employer. Suppose you and your spouse both have full-time jobs. You’re both covered through your employer, so your spouse waives the coverage offered through work. Then you lose your job, and the insurance that came with it.

WEDNESDAY, June 25 (HealthDay News) -- About 234 million major surgeries are performed worldwide each year, and surgery rates are much higher in high-income countries than in low-income countries, U.S. researchers report.

Dr. Thomas Weiser, of the Harvard School of Public Health, and his colleagues defined major surgeries as any incision, excision, manipulation or suturing of tissue occurring in an operating room and requiring local or general anesthesia or profound sedation to control pain. They analyzed surgical data from 56 countries.

By Shannon Koehle
EmpowHer's Health Reporter

Not long ago, health insurance woes were linked to Americans living in poverty.

However, a recent analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on promoting high performance healthcare, indicated insurance enigmas have spread to the middle class.

As the number of underinsured middle class Americans tripled since 2003, adults lacking medical insurance or were underinsured rose to 75 million.

After a car accident left Michelle Katz, a Washington, D.C., nursing student, with persistent back pain and numbness in 1998, she consulted a neurosurgeon, who told her she'd need an operation to repair her slipped disk. Katz, then 26, didn't have health insurance, so she did the only thing she could think of: She negotiated.

WEDNESDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- Electronic medical record systems are being touted as the wave of the future in health care and communication, but only 17 percent of U.S. doctors have embraced the technology, a new survey finds.

"When you use a good definition of what a record system is, very few physicians appear to have one," said lead study author Catherine M. DesRoches, at Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute for Health Policy, in Boston.