FDA BLOCKS A BETTER SUNBLOCK

The sun sends us two kinds of ultraviolet radiation: UVA and UVB. Our suntan lotions are good at screening out the sun's UVB rays, so they help us avoid sunburn and skin cancer. But our sunscreens don't offer much protection against UVA rays, and those are the rays that eventually make us look like prunes. "Ultraviolet A light ages your skin," said Dr. Darrell Rigel, clinical professor of dermatology at New York University. "It's a longer wavelength, so it can penetrate deeper into the skin, and instead of attacking the upper layers of the skin where skin cancer often forms, it attacks the layers that give your skin its tone, its elasticity, as we call it. ... You get the lines, the wrinkles, all the things associated from aging."

But there's good news. Lotions that contain the ingredients Oxybenzone, Titanium Dioxide or Parsol 1789 block out some UVA rays. Adding a chemical called Mexoryl offers even better protection. "It produces a product which gives us almost perfect protection against sunshine," said Dr. Vincent DeLeo, chairman of dermatology at Columbia University.

People are happily protecting themselves with Mexoryl in South America, Europe, Australia and Canada, but in the USA you are forbidden to use it. The FDA won't approve it. It won't even say why. Dermatologists assume Mexoryl is just stuck in the bureaucracy. It routinely takes 12 to 15 years for a drug to get approval, and after a drug — Vioxx, for example — gets bad publicity as a health risk, the FDA gets particularly cautious.

Common sense says we should use it Mexoryl. All drugs have risks as well as benefits, and Mexoryl has been in use in other countries for 13 years. It's passed many safety tests. Yet our FDA won't even talk about it? Although Mexoryl is illegal in the United States, ABC News found it at some pharmacies. Sometimes it was hidden. You had to ask for it. It was expensive — $30 to $50. I don't fault the pharmacists; they're serving their customers. Big government is the problem

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Massachusetts: Hospitals cut costs for uninsured: "Two of the state's largest hospital networks, Partners HealthCare and UMass Memorial Health Care, will no longer routinely charge uninsured patients full 'sticker price' for medical care, but instead will offer 15 to 50 percent discounts, in some cases as much as the mark-downs large health insurers receive. The goals are to provide a price break for uninsured patients who earn too much money to qualify for state assistance and to make collecting payments from them easier. The new policies come at a time when hospitals across the US face criticism and lawsuits over aggressive billing methods and for routinely charging the uninsured far more for treatment than they do health insurers. Executives at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said they routinely give patients discounts."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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