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Medicare officials are considering a measure that would penalize doctors who order routine prostate-cancer screening tests for their patients, as part of a federal effort to define and reward quality in health-care services. The proposal, which hasn’t been widely publicized, has prompted a flurry of last-minute comments to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including more than 200 in the past two days, virtually all in opposition. The official comment period began Oct. 26 and ends Friday. (Beck, 11/19)

U.S. public health funding – which covers things like disease prevention, cancer screenings, contraceptives and vaccines – has been steadily falling in recent years and is expected to keep going down, a recent study projects. Real, inflation-adjusted public health expenditures surged from $39 per capita in 1960 to $281 per capita in 2008, then fell 9.3 percent to $255 per capita in 2014, according to the analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health. (Rapaport, 11/18)