Franklin Memorial Hospital commits to cutting health-care costs
LIVERMORE FALLS, Maine— Franklin Memorial Hospital has recently made a commitment to rein in health care costs.It includes lowering costs to below the state average without shifting costs to commercial or private payers and creating the ability to thrive on a Medicare level of payment for everyone, Gerald Cayer, Franklin Community Health Network executive vice president announced Friday. He spoke to the media at the Androscoggin Valley Medical Arts Center.
1The Supreme Court Is Ruled by Right-Wing Extremists -- Can the Court's Moderate Women Counteract Their Radical Bent?
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on April 5, 2012, Printed on April 9, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/154885/the_supreme_court_is_ruled_by_right-wing_extremists_--_can_the_court%27s_moderate_women_counteract_their_radical_bent
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices may not like it, but in the week since its hearings on a new national healthcare reform law ended, the country has scrutinized their performance and the court of public opinion is not very impressed.
The troika of Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts, showed more sympathy to the insurance industry than to the uninsured, mocked Congress’ lawmaking powers, and seemed to be looking over the Affordable Care Act with an eye of where to insert their judicial dagger. Their colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas, sat silent as always, although everybody knows where his sympathies lie.
Poll: More Americans expect Supreme Court’s health-care decision to be political
By Robert Barnes and Scott Clement,
More Americans think Supreme Court justices will be acting mainly on their partisan political views than on a neutral reading of the law when they decide the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Half of the public expects the justices to rule mainly based on their “partisan political views,” while fewer, 40 percent, expect their decisions to be rooted primarily “on the basis of the law.” The rest say both equally or do not have an opinion.
The court held a historic three days of oral arguments on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act last month, and its ruling probably will come just before the court adjourns at the end of June. The poll shows little enthusiasm for the Obama administration’s position that the law, passed by the Democratic Congress in 2010, should be upheld in full.
For the Elderly, Emergency Rooms of Their Own
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Phyllis Spielberger, a retired hat seller at Bendel’s, picked at a plastic dish of beets and corn as her husband, Jason, sat at the foot of her hospital bed, telling her to eat.
Although she had been rushed to Manhattan’s busy Mount Sinai Hospital by ambulance when her leg gave out, the atmosphere she encountered upon her arrival was eerily calm.
There were no beeping machines or blinking lights or scurrying medical residents. A volunteer circulated among the patients like a flight attendant, making soothing conversation and offering reading glasses, Sudoku puzzles and hearing aids. Above them, an artificial sun shined through a skylight imprinted with a photographic rendering of a robin’s-egg-blue sky, puffy clouds and leafy trees.
Ms. Spielberger, who is in her 80s, was even getting into the spirit of the place, despite her unnerving condition. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything here is wonderful.”
Yet this was an emergency room, one specifically designed for the elderly, part of a growing trend of hospitals’ trying to cater to the medical needs and sensibilities of aging baby boomers and their parents. Mount Sinai opened its geriatric emergency department, or geri-ed, two months ago, modeling it in part after one at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., which opened in 2009.
HORT TAKES ON NEWS & EVENTS
Recession Boosted Hospital Expansions Into Affluent Areas, Study Finds
To Heal, First Eat
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
ST. HELENA, Calif.
SOME people cannot travel without Advil or a neck pillow. Dr. David M. Eisenberg, an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, feels incomplete without his beloved paring knife and eight-inch Wüsthof cleaver.
He was wielding both with sweaty zeal the other day on the dais of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, demonstrating a stir-fry with perfectly browned shiitake mushrooms and a heavy dose of sake to the 400 or so pediatricians, endocrinologists, dietitians and other health practitioners who were spending three and a half days in the Napa Valley learning how to cook. “This isn’tneurosurgery,” Dr. Eisenberg said as he whacked a garlic clove with the cleaver. “This is hearty, affordable, cravenly delicious food.”
Drug Data Shouldn’t Be Secret
By PETER DOSHI and TOM JEFFERSON
IN the fall of 2009, at the height of fears over swine flu, our research group discovered that a majority of clinical trial data for the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu — data that proved, according to its manufacturer, that the drug reduced the risk of hospitalization, serious complications and transmission — were missing, unpublished and inaccessible to the research community. From what we could tell from the limited clinical data that had been published in medical journals, the country’s most widely used and heavily stockpiled influenza drug appeared no more effective than aspirin.
After we published this finding in the British Medical Journal at the end of that year, Tamiflu’s manufacturer, Roche, announced that it would release internal reports to back up its claims that the drug was effective in reducing the complications of influenza. Roche promised access to data from 10 clinical trials, 8 of which had not been published a decade after completion, representing more than 4,000 patients from every continent except Antarctica. Independent verification of the data seemed imminent. But more than two years later, and despite repeated requests, we have yet to receive even a single full trial report. Instead, the manufacturer released portions of the reports, most likely a very small percentage of the total pages. (One of us, Tom Jefferson, has been retained as an expert witness in a lawsuit relating to some of these issues.)
Hospitals scramble on the front lines of drug shortages
By Lena H. Sun,
The situation was urgent. The operating room and many key units at MedStar Washington Hospital Center were running low on a critical anesthetic. Suppliers were out of the most commonly used dosages. The only remedy was for pharmacy staffers to dilute a higher concentration with saline solution to produce the needed strength.
Ann Breakenridge, an assistant pharmacy director, needed action immediately. “We have an acute shortage situation,” she told Renee McCarthy, who oversees the lab. “I need somebody to make some midazolam syringes, like yesterday.”
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