By JIM STOMMEN Medical Device Daily Contributing Writer   Talk about eating from the public trough: The folks who run Medicare are putting their money where our collective mouths are. The nation’s largest health insurance plan reported awhile back that it will pay for screenings and preventive services aimed at helping recipients battle obesity and its attendant medical ailments. For those who screen positive for obesity, the newly covered benefits include initial weekly counseling for the first month, followed by five months of every-other-week appointments. Presuming weight loss continues, another six months of once-monthly sessions may follow. My initial response...

The December conference of the American Society of Hematology (ASH, Washington) in San Diego was marked by the continued emphasis on diagnostic technologies as the core of a highly clinical and biological meeting. Few meetings across the clinical spectrum address biology, biochemistry, and biomarkers in a way that annual meetings at ASH in hematology, and at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO, Alexandria, Virginia) in solid oncology, tend to.

While few venture capitalists and venture-backed med-tech CEOs were sad to see 2011 come to an end, the outlook for 2012 might be even less optimistic in some respects, according to this year's Venture View predictions survey. (Medical Device Daily)