Today's Globe: healthcare overhaul costs, insurers' payments, Kennedy on health bill, glowing monkey offspring, mixed-race bone marrow matching, esophagus treatment, compression stockings, Tylenol warnings, smaller stent, Alexander Bearn

Soaring healthcare costs, combined with the recession, are threatening to undermine the gains from Massachusetts' 2006 healthcare overhaul, according to the third annual "Update on Health Reform in Massachusetts" published today.

The state government Medicaid plan known as MassHealth, which covers low-income patients who can't afford insurance, was the slowest payer of health claims to Massachusetts doctors last year, averaging 56 days, and denied the highest share of claims, 23.8 percent, according to rankings set to be released today.

"We have the greatest doctors and medical innovations in the world, but more and more Americans are on the outside looking in to a world of progress and discovery that is denied to them because they cannot afford quality healthcare," Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes on the opinion page. "That's wrong - and it's about to change."

Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring, an advance designed to give researchers new tools for studying human disease but one that raises a host of thorny ethical questions.

At a time when the number of multiracial Americans is rising, only a tiny fraction of donors on the national bone-marrow registry are of mixed race.

Zapping away abnormal, precancerous cells in the throat may lower the risk of later developing esophageal cancer, the first major study to test this technique finds.

Compression stockings widely prescribed to stroke patients do little or nothing to reduce the chance of a second blood clot, researchers reported yesterday.

Drug makers should limit doses and strengthen warnings on Johnson and Johnson's Tylenol and other medicines containing acetaminophen to reduce the risk of liver injury, according to a US report.

Boston Scientific Corp. said yesterday the Food and Drug Administration approved the Taxus Liberte Atom, a drug-coated stent designed to hold open small blood vessels in the heart.

Dr. Alexander G. Bearn, a physician and scientist whose research on a rare liver disease in the 1950s helped lay the groundwork for the field of human biochemical genetics, died May 15 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 86.