When doctors, hospitals, and insurers bellyache about malpractice claims with little evidence on their prevalence or outcomes, patients and politicians should push back: And they can cite the nightmares people in grievous circumstance have suffered when their constitutional right to seek justice in civil lawsuits gets stripped away. The Miami Herald and ProPublica, the Pulitzer….
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Cancer experts seeing advanced cases with care delayed by pandemic fears
One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic may be showing up in tragic fashion: Cancer specialists say they are treating a wave of advanced cases in which patients might have benefited from earlier care had fear of Covid-19 infection not kept them away from doctors’ offices and hospitals. The information about the harms of missed appointments,….
Continue ReadingVA hospital care under fire again after aide pleads to killing seven patients in West Virginia
She was a 46-year-old Army veteran hired by the Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in 2015 with no certification or license to care for patients. Reta Mays worked in the middle of the night, tending to elderly, onetime service personnel, sitting bedside and monitoring their vitals, including their blood sugar levels. Mays went room to….
Continue ReadingConcern rises over bias in race-based algorithms for medical decision-making
High-tech wizards may be pushing medicine into a brave new world where important medical decisions rely on supposedly data-driven findings that also may be rooted in an old malignancy: discrimination against black patients. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine warns that race-based tools and formulas, algorithms aimed to assist doctors….
Continue ReadingWhy does lethal bungling persist in fixing the Covid-19 nursing-home mess?
Hundreds of thousands of institutionalized Americans have been infected with the novel coronavirus. Tens of thousands of them are dead. Yet a lethal bungling persists in the response to Covid-19’s savaging of residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Why? Their owners and operators agree with medical scientists that significantly more testing is….
Continue ReadingPillars of medical establishment wobbling under pandemic’s big stresses
As the Covid-19 pandemic has put huge stresses on medical systems around the globe, the strains have taken their toll: The credibility and authority — of federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and elite professional journals….
Continue ReadingU.S. data show Covid-19’s terrible and unrelenting toll on nursing homes
Federal regulators have issued, at long last, the data they have collected on the novel coronavirus’ effect on nursing homes, giving an incomplete but still devastating look at how in just a few months some of the nation’s most vulnerable people have been savaged by Covid-19. With 12% of the nation’s nursing 15,000 homes yet….
Continue ReadingNursing homes, Covid-19 hot spots now, resisted emergency planning rules
With hurricanes, wildfires and other calamities, authorities pound home to the public the importance of preparedness. So why should preparing for an infection outbreak be any different? Yet more disclosures have raised disturbing questions about the dearth of crucial emergency planning by nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, their owners and operators, and federal….
Continue ReadingHuman fault or act of nature in coronavirus’s deadly assault on nursing homes?
Is the coronavirus’s staggering toll on patients in nursing homes something to be written off as a force of nature for which humans bear little fault? Or are there lessons to be learned about shortcomings that could help preserve lives the next time? News media reports keep unearthing institutional misery and a blindness to the suffering….
Continue ReadingNew hospitals may offer hope to D.C.’s poor, minority areas as Covid-19 rages
Even as the Covid-19 pandemic shows the terrible toll inflicted on African Americans in the District of Columbia by health care disparities, city officials have announced they are advancing with a pricey plan to plug a giant hole in area medical services by helping to fund not one but two new hospitals that will serve….
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