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Chronic disease is a modern plague: Nearly half of adults have either diabetes or pre-diabetes, one in three suffers from high blood pressure and more than two-thirds are overweight or obese. These conditions not only maim and kill; they cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars. Panelists at a forum sponsored here last week by USA TODAY and Cigna agreed that both access to health insurance coverage and healthy behaviors are key to bringing those costs down. The experts stressed that cost-control measures are especially needed in an era of health reform as the nation faces an aging population. (Ungar and O'Donnell, 9/22)

It’s a frustrating reality of the medical marketplace: Prices are all over the map. If you need an angioplasty to treat heart disease in Birmingham, Ala., it will cost about $15,500. But the identical procedure in Sacramento will cost four times as much. And even within the same Boston-area market, the price of removing a common type of skin cancer can vary by hundreds of dollars depending on which hospital you go to. (Ungar and O'Donnell, 9/21)