Daily coffee limbers up heart: at least in seniors.

Exercise reduces overeating: at least in obese rats.

Bottled tea beverages less healthy than brewed tea: fewer antioxidants.

What people ate 10,000 years ago in Utah: Sagebrush seed mush. Grinding stones made it possible.

Travelers are already asked to remove their shoes before passing through the security line, so it would not be much more to ask that they accompany a new TSA Medical Representative behind a curtain where they would remove their shoes and the rest of their clothing so that they could receive a brief but through examination, checking for moles, rashes, lumps, brucellosis, scabies, enlarged prostates, or other medical maladies.

Next, the passengers would step into an x-ray machine, where images of their bodies would display not only if they were carrying illegal contraband in their person, but also if they were carrying dangerous tumors or had non-specific fold-thickening of the duodenum.

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How do you know when the problem solvers have hit rock bottom? How do you know when they have exhausted every possible idea in the search for a solution to a nagging problem and come up empty? How do you know when they’re ready to throw in the towel and grasp at any last desperate hope — no matter how fleeting, no matter how far-fetched?

Answer:  They start a pilot program.

This is about the only idea for controlling costs in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, ObamaCare), and before I heap on it all the scorn and opprobrium it so richly deserves, let me say that on rare occasions pilot programs can generate very useful insights. Two examples come to mind.

Did you know that before there was a modern welfare state, the federal government actually did a test run? Called the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (SIME/DIME), they guaranteed the participants a minimum income, regardless of their wages or marital status. The results were stunning — at least stunning to the research community. Once couples realized they didn’t have to stay together for economic reasons, large numbers of them split up. Think about that. Before the welfare state created all the tragedy and the social pathology and dysfunctionality that we are living with today, federal government planners knew in advance what was going to happen!

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The new health law’s restrictions on the use of tax-favored accounts to purchase over-the-counter (OTC) medications will begin on January 1, 2011. Patients with Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs), and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) who purchase OTC medicines with their account debit cards will find denial confusion, and disappointment at the pharmacy checkout counter.

Those with FSAs or HRAs, who expect reimbursements from their accounts, will see their claims have been rejected. Those with HSAs may experience an IRS audit and a 20% excise tax penalty for an ineligible withdrawal. To make matters worse, the amount of money that can be set aside in FSAs for medical care will be limited to $2,500 in 2013.

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Only about 1 in 7 men with newly diagnosed prostate cancer are at risk for a serious form of the disease. “Out of 50,000 radical prostatectomies performed every year in the United States alone,” Dr. Scholz writes, “more than 40,000 are unnecessary. In other words, the vast majority of men with prostate cancer would have lived just as long without any operation at all. Most did not need to have their sexuality cut out.”

Full New York Times book review of Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers here.

Supermarket snake oil: Should food makers have to prove their health claims?

Can a pill relieve the pain of rejection by friends, coworkers, lovers, etc? Apparently, Tylenol can.

 Is the birth control pill responsible for fewer men graduation from college? Economist Tim Harford says it is.

Are hygienic and medical advances killing bacteria, viruses and fungi that are essential to our health? “Many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies.”

I would rank this up near the top of the characteristics I require in an acceptable retirement environment:

From behind the wheel of his minivan, Bill Szentmiklosi scours the streets of Sun City in search of zoning violations like unkempt yards and illegal storage sheds. Mostly, though, he is on the lookout for that most egregious of all infractions: children.

With a clipboard of alleged violations to investigate, he peers over fences and ambles into backyards of one of America’s pioneer retirement communities, a haven set aside exclusively for adults, where children are allowed to visit but not live.

See the full article on the child-ban in Sun City.

Five million uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP, but not enrolled. 39% are in California, Florida and Texas.

More than half of the 354 million annual doctor visits are not with a patient’s primary physician. More than a quarter take place in hospital emergency rooms.

Defensive-medicine costs $45.6 billion per year. (gated)

Officials in Washington can’t identify a single House member who’s running an ad boasting of a “yes” vote on health reform. Even though 219 Democrats voted yes.

About using concierge doctors, that is.

Since 2004, the primary care physicians at Tufts Medical Center have offered patients the option of being part of either a traditional general medical practice or a retainer practice. Patients in the retainer practice have longer visits, around-the-clock access to one of five physicians, comprehensive wellness and prevention screenings and on-time office appointments within 24 hours of a request. But unlike other boutique practices, the retainer fee of $1,800 per year that these patients pay does not go directly to the doctors’ coffers. Instead, it is used to support the traditional general medical practice, the teaching of medical students and trainees and free care to impoverished patients.

I think you have to be a touchy-feely bleeding heart to even have this problem. Full New York Times report on concierge medicine for the few here.

“Socialized insurance necessarily leads to socialized medicine, and if the government controls well over half of the insurance sector through Medicare and Medicaid, and tightly regulates the rest, it is only inevitable that it will also seek to control how health care is bought and sold.”

                         — David Dranove on ObamaCare, at The Health Care Blog