Today's Globe: health plan pitch, perks policy, the Rose Man, combining health agencies, HIV in chimps, Medicare drug savings, double arm transplant, swine flu vaccine, e-cigarettes, Philip Salib, Yury Verlinsky, Sidney Bijou, healthcare costs

President Obama sought to calm middle-class fears about a major healthcare overhaul last night, telling Americans in a prime-time news conference that people who already have insurance would benefit as much as those who do not.

A new organization of doctors - several from Boston - wants to roll back policies curbing interactions between doctors and drug company representatives, saying restrictive rules ultimately will hurt the patients they’re designed to protect.

Irwin Ehrenreich’s career as a surgeon ended when he lost a finger to a table saw accident. Now he and his wife run The Rose Man Nursery & Emporium.

Melrose and Wakefield believe they can improve their delivery of public health services and save costs by working together, making them among nine sets of communities across the state that are sharing health services.

Scientists believe they have found a “missing link’’ in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. It bridges the gap between the infection that does no harm to most monkeys and the one that kills millions of people. That link is a virus that is killing chimpanzees in the wild at a disturbingly high rate, according to a study in today’s journal Nature.

Medicare’s three-year-old prescription drug plan has largely met its main goal of making lifesaving medicines more affordable for seniors, a new report found.

The recipient of the world’s first complete double arm transplant scratched his head and back and beamed at his doctors yesterday, saying he was on the path to independence a year after the pioneering operation.

The world’s first human trials of a swine flu vaccine have begun in Australia, drug company officials said yesterday, with the aim of controlling the virus that has so far killed more than 700 worldwide.

Federal health officials said yesterday they have found cancer-causing ingredients in electronic cigarettes, despite makers’ claims the products are safer than tobacco cigarettes.

Dr. Philip Ibrahim Salib, who wrote an influential book on plaster casting, died July 2 from heart and kidney failure at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was 91 and lived in Chestnut Hill.

Yury Verlinsky, the Russian émigré who was the first researcher in the United States to perform chorionic villus sampling to detect birth defects and who pioneered the development of preimplantation genetic diagnosis to detect potential problems before a fertilized egg is implanted in the mother, died of colon cancer July 16 in Chicago. He was 65.

Sidney W. Bijou, who adapted a set of simple reward-based psychological techniques to treat troubled children and in the process helped establish behavioral therapy for childhood disorders like autism and attention-deficit disorder, died June 11 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 100.

"The Legislature’s recent decision to cut the fiscal 2010 budget for Commonwealth Care as part of the state’s enormous fiscal crisis has led to renewed claims that health reform is unaffordable," Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, writes on the opinion page. "These critics ignore the fact that the fundamental problem is not the costs of Commonwealth Care, but rather the unprecedented collapse of state tax revenues."