TV News LIES

In a year that included an attempted House repeal of the federal health care law, several court cases challenging its constitutionality and Republican candidate debates proposing a replacement plan, it can be difficult to dig through the rhetoric to determine just what the 2010 health care law has done.

The 2,400-page document and a multiyear and multistep implementation don't help with the confusion. Proponents and foes say big pieces of the law have been enacted and have already affected millions of people's lives.

Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of the nation’s second-most-abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could unleash a new wave of abuse.

The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as Vicodin. Four companies have begun patient testing, and one of them — Zogenix of San Diego — plans to apply early next year to begin marketing its product, Zohydro.

Some airport scanners may pose a cancer threat for people over age 65 and women genetically predisposed to breast cancer, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doctor said.

Dr. Edward Dauer, head of radiology at Florida Medical Center, said the scanners' low dose of radiation penetrates just below skin level, possibly endangering the eye lens, the thyroid and a woman's breasts, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported Sunday.

Visits to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department have climbed 20 percent in the past three years. "We've seen actually more very serious suicide attempts in that population than we had in the past as well," she said.

Compounding the problem are patients with chronic mental illness who have been hurt by a squeeze on mental health services and find themselves with nowhere to go. On top of that, doctors are seeing some cases where the patient's most critical need is a warm bed.

Despite seafood showing extremely high levels of contamination, the FDA still deems the food safe for consumption. The FDA not only falsely softened the risk of seafood consumption due to carcinogenic contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the seafood supply, but also ignored individual FDA staff members who called for higher levels of contamination protection.

Barack Obama's Justice Department have done what top attorneys for former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton could never do -- silenced the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana.

The modest medical cannabis dispensary -- which has operated since 1996, making the Fairfax-based pot club the state's oldest -- quietly shut down over the weekend under heavy pressure from federal prosecutors, according to the Marin Independent Journal.