Today's Globe: health care optimism, choice, device makers' tax fight, hand sanitizers, Atrius-Beth Israel affiliation, smoking rates, Gene Cohen

Two powerful health care interest groups yesterday urged lawmakers constructing a sweeping health care overhaul to focus on cost containment and affordability.

"So, with the Stupak-Pitts amendment hanging from it like an albatross, a bill was passed that would cover millions of uninsured Americans but also strip millions of American women of reproductive health converge," columnist Ellen Goodman writes on the opinion page. "To the uncompromising went the victory."

Massachusetts medical device companies continue to battle a proposed federal tax on device makers as lawmakers work to reconcile differences in the House and Senate versions of national health care overhaul legislation.

If you’re looking to launch a business, here are two words any budding entrepreneur should know: hand sanitizer.

Atrius Health, a Newton alliance of five community medical groups across Eastern Massachusetts, yesterday said it is expanding its ties with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston in an effort to control costs while maintaining quality.

Cigarette smoking rose slightly for the first time in almost 15 years, dashing health officials’ hopes that the US rate had moved permanently below 20 percent.

Gene Cohen, an impish geriatric psychiatrist who championed the idea that people past retirement age have untapped stores of creativity and intellectually rigorous skills in their later years, died Saturday of prostate cancer at his home in suburban Kensington, Md. He was 65.