Today's Globe: hospital fee review, health plan deductibles, ailing hospitals, smoking while pregnant, mammoth genome, heart pump survival, HIV treatment for babies, FDA in China, insurance offer, new antibiotics, Adrian Kantrowitz

Leaders of some large academic medical centers and community hospitals called for Governor Deval Patrick to examine how Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital, and a few other institutions are able to obtain higher prices from health insurers even though there is, especially for the most common procedures, often no demonstrated difference in the quality of the care delivered by those hospitals.

The typical health plan deductible in Massachusetts increased to $1,000 from $500, according to a national survey by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm.

The dismal economy has US hospitals ailing. New data show declines in admissions and elective procedures, plus a significant jump in the number of patients who can't pay, the American Hospital Association said yesterday.

People whose mothers smoked during pregnancy may be more likely to have damaged carotid arteries that could predispose them to heart attack and stroke, Dutch researchers said yesterday.

Scientists for the first time have unraveled much of the genetic code of an extinct animal, the Ice Age's woolly mammoth, and with it they are thawing "Jurassic Park" dreams.

A 14-year-old girl had two heart transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps - but no heart - for four months between the transplants.

Sooner is better when it comes to treating infants born with HIV, the AIDS virus, researchers reported yesterday.

The United States opened a branch of the Food and Drug Administration in the Chinese capital yesterday, the first of several overseas offices that will seek to regulate the safety of food and medicine bound for American supermarkets and pharmacies.

The health insurance industry has proposed guaranteeing coverage for every American, regardless of medical condition, in return for an enforceable requirement that everyone have a policy.

Federal health advisers backed the benefits of an experimental antibiotic but rebuffed another, citing questions that it would be able to fight dangerous staph infections, which are becoming more common (fifth item).

Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, the pioneering cardiovascular surgeon who performed the first US heart transplant, developed a balloon-pumping device that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and developed mechanical heart-assist devices, died of heart failure Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 90.