Insights

<p>Health reporters may be entering a season of scary airline food stories.</p> <p>After years of paying too little attention to the quality and safety of food being served in airplanes, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been forced to take the issue more seriously.</p> <p>Why?<img src="/files/u47/Airline_Food.jpg" alt="Airline Food" title="Credit: Samantha Marx via Flickr" width="240" height="180" style="float: left; margin-left: 15px; margin-right: 15px;" /></p>

<p>If you haven’t seen this Kaiser Family Foundation <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Ilc5xK2_E">health reform video</a> yet, you should. Aside from being quite cute, it’s a fairly even-handed explanation of what health reform will and won’t provide.</p>

<p>My editor forwarded me an e-mail from a reader, 55, frustrated that PacifiCare raised the cost of his policy to nearly $2,400 a month.</p><p>When the California governor's office sent out an announcement the morning of Monday, Oct. 25, about the state's new insurance plan, my first thought was this new plan should help this reader, so I gave him a call.&nbsp;</p><p>He was very forthcoming about the costs he was facing and his efforts to find less costly insurance. It took more time to reach the right state official and a spokesman for the insurance company.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re checking out today:</p> <p><strong>HuffPo Health:</strong> Orac of the Respectful Insolence blog <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/10/huffpost_health_a_soon-to-be_… on the new Huffington Post health section</a>, and it’s not pretty: “A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery.”</p>

<p>Here we were, a couple dozen reporters from some of the best, sharpest news outlets around the state, veteran journalists with a nose for news and a passion for learning how we could improve, sharpen and expand our skills and knowledge of health care reporting. We convened at the Millenium Biltmore hotel in downtown Los Angeles for an extraordinary three-and-a-half day fellowship experience to talk shop, listen to some of the country's experts in public health and health journalism and form our own network of sorts as professionals on a common mission.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re checking out today:</p> <p><strong>Bad Boys: </strong>FiercePharma has put together a slideshow of <a href="http://www.fiercepharma.com/slideshows/notorious-names-biopharma?img=0"… misbehaving executives and researchers</a> in the biotech and pharma industries. It’s juicy.</p>

<p>When a fire starts in a hotel room, guests can pull an alarm and let everyone know they should head for the stairs.</p> <p>When cars pile up on the freeway, police set up barriers to keep more people from meeting the same fate.</p> <p>When a physician is deemed an “immediate threat and danger to public safety” in New Mexico, the New Mexico Medical Board sends out an all-points bulletin. Wait. No, it doesn’t. It actually keeps that information a secret.</p> <p>How?</p>

<p>When <a href="http://www.propublica.org/site/author/charles_ornstein">Charles Ornstein</a> talks about how to cover hospital quality, people tend to listen. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-kingdrew-gallery,0,5651209.storyga…; with Tracy Weber on egregiously poor medical care and other problems at a Los Angeles hospital led to its closure.</p>

<p>It’s always good to get a statistics refresher if you cover any kind of health research. Erika Franklin Fowler, an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, offered some tips on Saturday to California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows gathered for a seminar in Los Angeles. (Click <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/39975940/Erika-Franklin-Fowler-Getting-a-Grip…; for her complete presentation.)</p> <p>Here are some basic questions Fowler suggests journalists should ask before diving in to cover a medical study:</p>