This week Connecticut's leaders had to close a $350 million hole in the state's budget. One place they cut is hospital funding, and that's making hospital executives furious. The battles lines are clear. Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, says the hospitals are getting rich off taxpayers, making more money than in past years — thanks, in part, to the Affordable Care Act. So he thinks hospitals can afford to give some money back. "If you make almost a billion dollars a year, how bad are things?" Malloy asks. "If you're having the best results in recent history in hospital performance why do you need the citizens of Connecticut to give you an additional $500 million?"
More than seven in 10 residents of Kentucky want their new governor, Matt Bevin, to keep the state's expanded Medicaid program as it is, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. And more than half of respondents described Medicaid as important for themselves and their families, underscoring the program's substantial reach in the state and the challenges Mr. Bevin may face if he seeks to scale back or modify it. Mr. Bevin, a Republican who took office Tuesday, is an opponent of the Affordable Care Act who earlier this year called for reversing the Medicaid expansion on the grounds that it was unaffordable for the state.
The president of Nemours Hospital, Dana Bledsoe, and her 82-year-old mother were robbed at gunpoint while window-shopping at an Orlando shopping plaza, News 6 has learned. The robbery happened on Nov. 20 outside of the Z-Gallerie store near Mall at Millenia, police said. Orlando police arrested a 14-year-old and 16-year-old on armed robbery charges. The thieves took the victim's bags, credit cards and cellphones after telling the women to, "Give me your purses now, just give them to me now," the report states. The robbery was caught on surveillance video. People out shopping Saturday morning say the area may look nice, but the crime there is becoming a real problem.
Over 120 Yale students, employees, and New Haven workers were arrested Saturday for an act of civil disobedience on the outskirts of the Yale-New Haven Hospital to draw attention to the jobs crisis in New Haven and call on the hospital to secure more jobs for city residents. A crowd of over three hundred union and labor organizers convened on Cross Campus at 12 p.m., marching through West River and stopping at Howard Street. The New Haven Police Department gave a group of the protestors three warnings to clear the street before handcuffing them and writing each of them citations for $103.
The Missoula Police Department shut down the 500 block of West Broadway for 30 minutes Saturday afternoon as officers investigated the death of a 53-year-old woman. Authorities responded to reports of an unresponsive adult female at around 8 a.m. Saturday morning outside St. Patrick's Hospital. They located the body near the southwest corner of the Broadway building, officials said. Blood was found at the scene, but there were no foot tracks in the freshly fallen snow. Investigators said she was homeless, and that she had been in Missoula for at least a month. Sergeant Colin Rose said they shut down West Broadway to search for evidence.
Seasonal flu caused as many as 55,000 deaths in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It may surprise you to know that some of these deaths are likely the result of health-care workers transmitting the influenza virus to their patients. Hospitals have begun requiring their staff to get vaccinated, or wear masks if they cannot or will not get vaccinated. The mandates work: A CDC survey this year showed that hospitals, physician offices, long-term care facilities and other clinics with mandatory vaccination achieved 96% coverage for their workers, compared with 44% coverage in institutions that don't. A 2014 CDC study showed that health-care worker vaccinations reduce patients' risk of influenza-like illness by 42%. [Subscription Required]