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PETRA, Jordan (AP) — President Barack Obama set aside the Middle East's tricky politics Saturday to marvel at the beauty of one of the region's most stunning sites, the fabled ancient city of Petra.

"This is pretty spectacular," he said, craning his neck to gaze up at the rock faces after emerging from a narrow pathway into a sun-splashed plaza in front of the grand Treasury. The soaring facade is considered the masterpiece of the ancient city carved into the rose-red stone by the Nabataeans more than 2,000 years ago.

Obama's turn as tourist capped a four-day visit to the Middle East that included stops in Israel and the West Bank, as well Jordan. The White House set low policy expectations for the trip, and the president was returning to Washington with few tangible achievements to show. Aides said his intention instead was to reassure the region's politicians and people — particularly in Israel — that he is committed to their security and prosperity.

Curious residents and picture-taking tourists lined the streets of modern Petra as Obama's motorcade wound toward the entrance to the ancient city. The president, dressed in khaki pants, a black jacket and hiking boots, began his walking tour at the entrance to the Siq, a narrow, winding gorge cutting between two soaring cliffs.

The path opened into a dusty plaza with the massive columned Treasury as its centerpiece. Obama declared the carved monument is "amazing."

The Bedouins named the building the Treasury because they believed that urns sculpted on top of it contained great treasures. In reality, the urns represented a memorial for Nabataean royalty. Over time, historians have disagreed on the Treasury's purpose. However, a recent excavation proved that a graveyard exists underneath it.

The Nabataeans established Petra as a crucial junction for trade routes linking China, India and southern Arabia with Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome. The city flourished until trade routes were redirected in the seventh century, leading to Petra's demise.

Petra is Jordan's most popular tourist attraction, drawing more than a half million visitors yearly since 2007. It may be familiar to many people who saw the 1989 movie, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." Some scenes were filmed in the ancient city.

High winds and overcast skies nearly grounded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, in the Jordanian capital of Amman, which would have forced Obama to scrap the tourist stop. But the weather cleared enough for him and his delegation to make the hour-long flight across Jordan's rugged landscape, arriving in Petra under bright sunshine.

The president departed Jordan after the tour and was due back in Washington late Saturday.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Have a heart problem? If it's fixable, there's a good chance it can be done without surgery, using tiny tools and devices that are pushed through tubes into blood vessels.

Heart care is in the midst of a transformation. Many problems that once required sawing through the breastbone and opening up the chest for open heart surgery now can be treated with a nip, twist or patch through a tube.

These minimal procedures used to be done just to unclog arteries and correct less common heart rhythm problems. Now some patients are getting such repairs for valves, irregular heartbeats, holes in the heart and other defects - without major surgery. Doctors even are testing ways to treat high blood pressure with some of these new approaches.

All rely on catheters - hollow tubes that let doctors burn away and reshape heart tissue or correct defects through small holes in blood vessels.

"This is the replacement for the surgeon's knife. Instead of opening the chest, we're able to put catheters in through the leg, sometimes through the arm," said Dr. Spencer King of St. Joseph's Heart and Vascular Institute in Atlanta. He is former president of the American College of Cardiology. Its conference earlier this month featured research on these novel devices.

"Many patients after having this kind of procedure in a day or two can go home" rather than staying in the hospital while a big wound heals, he said. It may lead to cheaper treatment, although the initial cost of the novel devices often offsets the savings from shorter hospital stays.

Not everyone can have catheter treatment, and some promising devices have hit snags in testing. Others on the market now are so new that it will take several years to see if their results last as long as the benefits from surgery do.

But already, these procedures have allowed many people too old or frail for an operation to get help for problems that otherwise would likely kill them.

"You can do these on 90-year-old patients," King said.

These methods also offer an option for people who cannot tolerate long-term use of blood thinners or other drugs to manage their conditions, or who don't get enough help from these medicines and are getting worse.

"It's opened up a whole new field," said Dr. Hadley Wilson, cardiology chief at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte. "We can hopefully treat more patients more definitively, with better results."

For patients, this is crucial: Make sure you are evaluated by a "heart team" that includes a surgeon as well as other specialists who do less invasive treatments. Many patients now get whatever treatment is offered by whatever specialist they are sent to, and those specialists sometimes are rivals.

"We want to get away from that" and do whatever is best for the patient, said Dr. Timothy Gardner, a surgeon at Christiana Care Health System in Newark, Del., and an American Heart Association spokesman. "There shouldn't be a rivalry in the field."

Here are some common problems and newer treatments for them:

HEART VALVES

Millions of people have leaky heart valves. Each year, more than 100,000 people in the United States alone have surgery for them. A common one is the aortic valve, the heart's main gate. It can stiffen and narrow, making the heart strain to push blood through it. Without a valve replacement operation, half of these patients die within two years, yet many are too weak to have one.

"Essentially, this was a death sentence," said Dr. John Harold, a Los Angeles heart specialist who is president of the College of Cardiology.

That changed just over a year ago, when Edwards Lifesciences Corp. won approval to sell an artificial aortic valve flexible and small enough to fit into a catheter and wedged inside the bad one. At first it was just for inoperable patients. Last fall, use was expanded to include people able to have surgery but at high risk of complications.

Gary Verwer, 76, of Napa, Calif., had a bypass operation in 1988 that made surgery too risky when he later developed trouble with his aortic valve.

"It was getting worse every day. I couldn't walk from my bed to my bathroom without having to sit down and rest," he said. After getting a new valve through a catheter last April at Stanford University, "everything changed; it was almost immediate," he said. "Now I can walk almost three miles a day and enjoy it. I'm not tired at all."

"The chest cracking part is not the most fun," he said of his earlier bypass surgery. "It was a great relief not to have to go through that recovery again."

Catheter-based treatments for other valves also are in testing. One for the mitral valve - Abbott Laboratories' MitraClip - had a mixed review by federal Food and Drug Administration advisers this week; whether it will win FDA approval is unclear. It is already sold in Europe.

HEART RHYTHM PROBLEMS

Catheters can contain tools to vaporize or "ablate" bits of heart tissue that cause abnormal signals that control the heartbeat. This used to be done only for some serious or relatively rare problems, or surgically if a patient was having an operation for another heart issue.

Now catheter ablation is being used for the most common rhythm problem - atrial fibrillation, which plagues about 3 million Americans and 15 million people worldwide. The upper chambers of the heart quiver or beat too fast or too slow. That lets blood pool in a small pouch off one of these chambers. Clots can form in the pouch and travel to the brain, causing a stroke.

Ablation addresses the underlying rhythm problem. To address the stroke risk from pooled blood, several novel devices aim to plug or seal off the pouch. Only one has approval in the U.S. now - SentreHeart Inc.'s Lariat, a tiny lasso to cinch the pouch shut. It uses two catheters that act like chopsticks. One goes through a blood vessel and into the pouch to help guide placement of the device, which is contained in a second catheter poked under the ribs to the outside of the heart. A loop is released to circle the top of the pouch where it meets the heart, sealing off the pouch.

A different kind of device - Boston Scientific Corp.'s Watchman - is sold in Europe and parts of Asia, but is pending before the FDA in the U.S. It's like a tiny umbrella pushed through a vein and then opened inside the heart to plug the troublesome pouch. Early results from a pivotal study released by the company suggested it would miss a key goal, making its future in the U.S. uncertain.

HEART DEFECTS

Some people have a hole in a heart wall called an atrial septal defect that causes abnormal blood flow. St. Jude Medical Inc.'s Amplatzer is a fabric-mesh patch threaded through catheters to plug the hole.

The patch is also being tested for a more common defect - PFO, a hole that results when the heart wall doesn't seal the way it should after birth. This can raise the risk of stroke. In two new studies, the device did not meet the main goal of lowering the risk of repeat strokes in people who had already suffered one, but some doctors were encouraged by other results.

CLOGGED ARTERIES

The original catheter-based treatment - balloon angioplasty - is still used hundreds of thousands of times each year in the U.S. alone. A Japanese company, Terumo Corp., is one of the leaders of a new way to do it that is easier on patients - through a catheter in the arm rather than the groin.

Newer stents that prop arteries open and then dissolve over time, aimed at reducing the risk of blood clots, also are in late-stage testing.

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE

About 75 million Americans and 1 billion people worldwide have high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks. Researchers are testing a possible long-term fix for dangerously high pressure that can't be controlled with multiple medications.

It uses a catheter and radio waves to zap nerves, located near the kidneys, which fuel high blood pressure. At least one device is approved in Europe and several companies are testing devices in the United States.

"We're very excited about this," said Harold, the cardiology college's president. It offers hope to "essentially cure high blood pressure."

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Three years, two elections, and one Supreme Court decision after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, its promise of health care for the uninsured may be delayed or undercut in much of the country because of entrenched opposition from many Republican state leaders.

In half the states, mainly led by Democrats, officials are racing deadlines to connect uninsured residents to coverage now only months away. In others it's as if "Obamacare" - signed Mar. 23, 2010 - had never passed.

Make no mistake, the federal government will step in and create new insurance markets in the 26 mostly red states declining to run their own. Just like the state-run markets in mostly Democratic-led states, the feds will start signing up customers Oct. 1 for coverage effective Jan. 1. But they need a broad cross-section of people, or else the pool will be stuck with what the government calls the "sick and worried" - the costliest patients.

Insurance markets, or exchanges, are one prong of Obama's law, providing subsidized private coverage for middle-class households who currently can't get their own. The other major piece is a Medicaid expansion to serve more low-income people. And at least 13 states have already indicated they will not agree to that.

"It could look like two or three different countries," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard School of Public Health professor who studies public opinion on health care. "The political culture of a state is going to play an important role in getting millions of people to voluntarily sign up."

Civic leadership - from governors, legislators, mayors and business and religious groups - is shaping up as a huge factor in the launch of Obama's plan, particularly since the penalty for ignoring the law's requirement to get coverage is as low as $95 the first year.

People-to-people contacts will be key, and the potential for patchwork results is real.

"Obviously it's a possibility in terms of there being some real difficulties," said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., whose efforts helped pass the law. Casey also said he believes the Obama administration will be ready to lead in states holding back.

Disparities already are cropping up.

Town Meeting Day - the first Tuesday in March - is a storied tradition in Vermont, and this year it provided a platform to educate residents about their options under the health care law. As many as 250,000 may eventually get coverage through Vermont Health Connect, as the state's marketplace is known.

"Even before we were a state, these town meetings existed," said Sean Sheehan, director of education and outreach. "It's a way people come together as a community, and we are counting on those community connections to get the word out." The health care plan was on the agenda at about 100 town meetings, and other local gatherings are taking place.

Texas residents are entitled to the same benefits as Vermonters, but in the state with the highest proportion of its population uninsured, Gov. Rick Perry will not be promoting the federal insurance exchange, a spokeswoman said. Nor does Perry plan to expand Medicaid.

The result is a communications void that civic and political groups, mayors, insurers and hospitals will try to fill.

"You have people who aren't really charged up about it because they don't even know that they would qualify," said Durrel Douglas, spokesman for the Texas Organizing Project, an activist group. A national poll this week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that two of every three uninsured people don't know enough about the law to understand how it will affect them.

Supporters of Obama's law in Texas say the federal government hasn't shown up yet to launch the state's insurance exchange and no one is sure when that will happen.

"It is a much bigger lift here," said Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income people. "The sooner the federal exchange can get engaged and working with all the folks here who want to promote enrollment, the better."

The Congressional Budget Office predicts a slow start overall, with only 7 million gaining coverage through the exchanges next year, rising to 24 million in 2016.

At a recent insurance industry meeting, federal officials directing the rollout rattled off a dizzying list of deadlines. Public outreach will begin in earnest this summer and early fall, said Gary Cohen, head of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

The government sees three main groups of potential customers for the new insurance markets, he said.

There's the "active sick and worried," people who are uninsured or have pre-existing medical conditions. Under the law, insurers will no longer be able to turn the sick away.

There's the healthy and young. "They feel invincible, they don't feel a need for health insurance," said Cohen.

Finally, there's the passive and unengaged. "For these people, a significant education effort needs to happen," he said.

To keep premiums affordable, the government will need to sign up lots of people from the last two groups to balance those in poor health, who will have a strong motivation to join.

The official heading consumer outreach for the rollout, Julie Bataille, acknowledges the challenge but says she's confident.

"This is a really an enormous opportunity for us to change the conversation around health care and help individuals understand the benefits they can get," she said.

© 2013 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED. Learn more about our PRIVACY POLICY and TERMS OF USE.