While US lawmakers are busy bailing out banks, insurance giants and we’ll see about car companies, the Italians have rushed to bail out Parmesan cheese makers.

What’s next, buffalo mozzarella?

And how could it come to this for the iconic pasta-topper when demand remains strong in Italy and abroad?

It’s simple. Producers can’t cover their costs.

Marco Iemmi and his 7 employees for example produce 15 thousand 77-pound Parmesan wheels a year. Last year he sold them at 7.4 Euros per kilogram, but he spent 8 Euros per kilo to produce them.

“It’s a tragic situation,” Iemmi told the Wall Street Journal. “I’ll have to close up shop unless things improve.”

So thank heavens for the Italian government which announced it will subsidize Parmesan makers by purchasing 100,000 wheels and donating them to charity.

Most Italians on ‘Strada Principale’ support the bailout.

“Parmigiano is almost indispensable,” Antonio Piermani told the Journal. The Rome wine-bar owner buys 3 kilos per month and swears that any substitute “would compromise the taste of the dish.”

Italy’s cheese crisis is the product of a fragmented producer sector. The world’s supply of Parmesan comes from about 400 tiny, family-owned businesses located near Parma in northern Italy. They understand economies of scale, but refuse to consolidate.

“We have an ancient mind-set,” Iemmi explained. “Each one of us wants to take care of his own little business.”

Meaning producers have no leverage with wholesalers, and not even the Pope would dare to mess with the meticulous Parmesan production process that has remained unchanged for several hundred years.

There’s even price competition, at least in Italy where 80% of the world’s Parmesan is consumed. Grana Padano, another grated cheese has a similar taste and costs less to produce.

President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are planning to beef up health care reform provisions in January’s economic stimulus package in order to jump-start the reform process and boost the economy in one fell swoop.

As part of his $600 billion New Year’s treat, the Big O already said he’d bump up Medicaid spending –$40 billion or so over two years — and invest in health IT.

Under consideration are expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA—the law that allows unemployed people to purchase health insurance through a previous employer’s plan, and some worker retraining programs.

Obama reasoned at a press conference that health system reform “has to be intimately woven into our overall economic recovery plan. It’s not something that we can sort of put off because we’re in an emergency…this is part of the emergency.”

Plus Obama learned from Hil-93 that he’s got to come out swinging. “Get a running start,” is the way Nancy LeaMond described it to the Post. LeaMond is executive vice president at AARP.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus added that whipping health system reform into the recovery package is a time-saver because it bypasses Congressional debates and budget-wrangling exercises.

(For better or worse, we add.)

Other than that, Baucus’ big thing is health IT, especially the mass implementation of electronic medical records.

“It’s very important that health IT be part of the economic recovery,” Baucus told the Post. “It represents the beginning of health care reform.”

During the campaign, the Big O promised $50 billion to get providers with computers. Sources told the Post $10 billion of that might be wrapped into the New Year’s treat with a real nice bow on top.

Driven by a marked increase in CT scanning, overall utilization of X-ray imaging in pregnant women has doubled in the last 10 years, according to a study presented at the RSNA meetings.

Elizabeth Lazarus and colleagues studied data from 5,235 radiology exams done on 3,249 women in the decade between 1997 and 2006. They found that CT utilization increased 25% per year during the decade. Use of plain x-ray tests and nuclear medicine studies increased 7% and 10% respectively.

The most frequent reason to order a CT scan was for the evaluation of headache (37%), a common symptom during pregnancy. Head CTs expose the fetus to less than 1 mGy of ionizing radiation.

But 32% of CT referrals were for abdomino-pelvic studies, typically to rule-out appendicitis. In these studies fetal exposure approximates 20 mGy.

Lazarus indicated that the standard allowable threshold for the fetus is 50 mGY. “So even abdominal studies were well within allowable bounds,” she told MedPageToday.

Of course no one really knows this for sure, and the time during pregnancy when the fetus is exposed has to play a role, although this wasn’t analyzed. Then there’s the matter of repeat scans during pregnancy, which did occur in some patients.

The study also did not report on the percentage of scans that actually changed care plans.

The American College of Radiology has published guidelines for using x-rays during pregnancy. The extent to which these guidelines were followed in this survey is also unknown.

No one believes that pregnant women became sicker during the study period, or that utilization of CT scanning at the beginning of the decade had been inappropriately low, by the way.