Who has the president’s ear in the health debate? MedCity Morning Read, Nov. 27, 2009

Highlights of the important and the interesting in the world of health care:

Who’s got the president’s ear? The Associated Press has obtained a list of 575 White House visitor records relating to President Obama’s plans to overhaul the health care system. Not surprisingly, lots of lobbyists, strategists, and health insurance chief executives’ names are included in the list, Editor and Publisher reports. Lobbyists for Big Pharma, health insurers and health software firms dot the list of visitors to Obama’s top aides. Click the link above to check some of the names. After pledging during his campaign to change Washington’s lobbyist-dominated culture, Obama’s actions hardly seem to be living up to his rhetoric on the lobbyist issue and others (cough…Guantanamo….cough). And that can’t be pleasing to plenty of his supporters.

The “rationing” bogeyman rears its ugly head: Washington Post columnist Gene Robinson opines that the recent controversy over how often women should have mammograms reveals an ugly truth: “Health-care reform that actually controls costs — rather than just pretending to do so — would be virtually impossible to achieve.” Robinson asks how much expensive and unnecessary testing are we willing to pay for in order to save one life. His answer, and presumably that of many, is a whole lot, especially when it comes to our own loved ones.

“Put a lid on everybody else’s costs, but don’t touch mine,” he writes, summing up what’s likely the prevailing opinion. In other words, the skyrocketing premiums we’ve all been suffering through in recent years won’t be going away any time soon.

Explaining racial disparities in infant mortality: Researchers have descended upon Dane County, Wisc., seeking an explanation for why the area’s infant-mortality rate for blacks has plummeted to five deaths per 1,000 births from 19 deaths in the 1990s, the New York Times reports. Nationwide in 2007, the corresponding numbers are 13 deaths per 1,000 births for blacks and six for whites.

Finding out what went right in Dane County has become an urgent quest — one that might guide similar progress in other cities. In other parts of the state, including Milwaukee, Racine and two other counties, black infant death rates remain among the nation’s highest, surpassing 20 deaths per thousand in some areas.