The House Education and Labor Committee on Wednesday voted 33 to 9 to approve legislation (HR 1424) that would require health insurers to provide equal insurance coverage levels for mental and physical illnesses, CQ Today reports. The legislation differs somewhat from a Senate measure ( [click link for full article]

South Carolina has received federal approval for two Medicaid pilot programs proposed by Gov. Mark Sanford (R), the Morris/Augusta Chronicle reports. The first program, called Healthy Opportunity Accounts, will provide beneficiaries with money to use for health care expenses. Adult beneficiaries will receive $2,500 annually and children will receive $1,000 annually under the program. [click link for full article]

President Bush on Wednesday said he will veto Senate legislation that would increase funding for SCHIP by $35 billion over five years because expanding the program would lead to more people dropping private health coverage, the Baltimore Sun reports (West, Baltimore Sun, 7/19). [click link for full article]

Emilienne Raoul — the Republic of Congo’s minister of health, social affairs and family — on Sunday called on Congolese men to take a more active role in improving maternal health in the country, IRIN News reports. Congo’s maternal mortality rate is higher than the average rate in Africa. [click link for full article]

Millions of Medicaid beneficiaries might “not be able to obtain their medications” after Oct. 1, when a law requiring pharmacists to reject prescriptions not written on tamper-resistant pads goes into effect, pharmacist groups wrote in a recent letter to lawmakers, the AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. [click link for full article]

According to a new study in Value in Health, women coping with the strain of being mistakenly diagnosed with breast cancer have not been adequately studied in the past. The focus of the study is a new survey that accurately assesses the negative effects of false diagnosis and provides useful information to health care practitioners and researchers.”We know that having a false alarm at a breast cancer screening causes significant negative psychological harm,” says Dr. [click link for full article]

The growing number of physicians who do not accept new Medicaid beneficiaries because of costs “is a large, little-discussed hurdle to some ambitious efforts to broaden health care coverage,” the Wall Street Journal reports. [click link for full article]

Fertility clinics might be overusing a laboratory technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection despite the technique’s additional cost, uncertain efficacy and risks, according to a study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports (Stobbe, AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 7/18). [click link for full article]

Almost one-quarter of all children in Zimbabwe are orphans, primarily because of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, according to a recent survey conducted by Zimbabwe’s Central Statistics Office in collaboration with Maryland-based ORC Macro, the [click link for full article]

A diet that surpasses government recommendations for daily servings of fruits and vegetables does not boost breast cancer survival rates in women, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Chicago Tribune reports (Peres, Chicago Tribune, 7/18). [click link for full article]