Today's Globe: health bill echoes, immigrants' hurdles, detained immigrants, rape treatment cuts, phony prescriptions, swine flu in cat, old bypass method

Americans’ opinion of the health care proposals now before Congress is eerily similar to public sentiment about the Clinton health reform initiatives in 1994, according to an analysis published online yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine - and that may not bode well for Democrats.

The Patrick administration has trumpeted its salvaging of health insurance for 28,000 legal immigrants, but the company hired to cover this group has been late assigning doctors and sending enrollment information to many patients, health and immigrant advocates say.

"While outside the prison gates the nation debates whether to overhaul the health care system with a public option, detained immigrants have no option at all," Laura Rótolo, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and author of the recent ACLU report “Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE," writes on the opinion page.

A program championed by advocates as the most sensitive and effective way to treat victims of rape and sexual abuse is taking a 40 percent hit from the state budget ax, one of a series of cuts Governor Deval Patrick announced last week to close a $600 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that ends June 30.

A Virginia doctor who pleaded guilty to tax evasion and writing thousands of prescriptions over the Internet for people he never met was sentenced yesterday in federal court in Boston, acting US Attorney Michael K. Loucks announced (third item).

A 13-year-old cat has been infected with swine flu, veterinary and federal officials said yesterday in what is believed to be the first case of the H1N1 virus in a feline.

It seemed like a great idea - doing bypass surgery while the heart is still beating, sparing patients the complications that can come from going on a heart-lung machine. Now, the first big test of this method has produced a surprise: Bypass has fewer problems and is more successful done the old way.