The nurses complained, and so did a handful of doctors. The patients howled. Yet, for years, administrators at a Florida hospital ignored the repeated alarms, critics say. Now, 350 lawsuits have been filed and 100 more are expected, all asserting that Dr. Richard David Heekin, a seasoned orthopedist, suffered from a progressively debilitating, rare, neurologic….
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Senate panel assails transplant system for causing deaths and disease
UNOS, the independent medical network responsible for procuring and distributing human organs for transplants in this country, needs big changes because it is failing desperate patients, making screening errors, among other missteps, that have killed dozens of them and caused hundreds to develop procedure-related diseases. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee reviewed hundreds of thousands of….
Continue ReadingBig Pharma’s rough summer could be a boon for struggling patients
Big Pharma has run into a rare rough summer — and that could be positive news for all the rest of us regular folks. Just how? Consider: One of the world’s largest makers of prescription medications — which also is one of several pharma titans implicated in the record-breaking opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis,….
Continue ReadingHospitals’ ‘charity’: 2.3% of patient revenue vs. $60 billion in tax breaks
Play this one out in your mind: a guy you know at church — he’ll be the first to let you know he makes $200,000 a year — tells you about how he gave to charity a junker car worth not more than $4,600 (2% of his income). Now what’s your reaction if you learn….
Continue ReadingSuperbug deaths & antibiotic abuse surged during pandemic
With the coronavirus pandemic surging anew due to the highly infectious Omicron BA.5 variant, federal authorities reported recent data that should give Americans plenty of reason to heed public health warnings and avoid hospitalization if they possibly can. That’s in part because institutions, overwhelmed by the pandemic, have taken giant steps backward in preventing patients….
Continue ReadingAs medical costs, especially for cancer, slam patients, where’s Congress?
While Congress seems paralyzed or, at best, willing to shrink significantly its efforts to help Americans deal with the punishing costs of care in the U.S. medical system, could federal lawmakers be confronted at the same time with more compelling evidence about the need for aggressive, not timid, action? Do beleaguered constituents need to barrage….
Continue ReadingU.S. nears next health insurance cliff with affordability crisis growing
Even as Congress lumbers into creating the next crisis for millions of Americans and whether they can access and afford health insurance, the giant, built-in flaws in the current coverage system keep sending far too many patients and their loved ones into a financial morass with which politicians and policymakers refuse to reckon. Successive Democratic….
Continue ReadingThe U.S. summer of 2022: Infectious outbreaks and vital vaccines
In the 21st century, in the wealthiest and supposedly most advanced nation on the planet, infectious diseases and vaccines continue to be major part of the news headlines. Experts and regular folks are paying attention to the persistent coronavirus pandemic, a stubborn and apparently widening outbreak of monkeypox, and a startling spike of meningitis and….
Continue ReadingHealth insurers start to join hospitals in giant disclosure of data on prices
If patients can benefit from price transparency by hospitals, shouldn’t employers and health insurers post online what they are paying for medical services? Yes, say federal regulators, who started requiring this effective July 1. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has ordered parties that act as health payers to make public a wealth….
Continue ReadingSenators kill big plan to modernize VA care but offer no alternatives
One of the nation’s largest health care systems had its ambitious plans to reshape itself for the 21st century torpedoed by a dozen members of the U.S. Senate, with taxpayers and veterans left in the lurch with great uncertainty about the future medical care for those who valiantly have served this country. Just a few….
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