Now that President Obama has signed historic food-safety legislation into law, the coalition of food industry, public interest and consumer groups that supported the new law must convince the new Congress – including the majority Republican House of Representatives pledged to shrink the federal bureaucracy – to fund it. The law aims to shift the….
Continue ReadingArchives for January 2011
One hospital: Three wrong-site surgeries in four months
Federal and Massachusetts state health investigators have cited a Boston teaching hospital for making at least three surgical errors in the last four months of 2010, all of which involved surgeons operating on the wrong vertebrae during spinal surgery. Two of the surgeries were performed by the same surgeon, whose name has not been released…..
Continue ReadingThe “Defensive Medicine” Fraud
The idea that doctors order unnecessary tests to avoid being sued has enough surface plausibility that people nod “of course” as if it’s undeniable truth. The “fraud” of “defensive medicine” is two-fold: It doesn’t really happen, at least not that anyone has ever proven, and even if it did happen, it would mean that doctors….
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