An obscure parliamentary maneuver favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to pass healthcare reform has triggered debate over the strategy's legitimacy and political wisdom, the Washington Post reports. Republicans condemned Pelosi's idea—in which House members would make a final decision on broad healthcare changes without voting directly on the Senate version of the bill—as an abuse of the legislative process. Parliamentary experts of both parties said the tactic has been used with increasing frequency in recent years by Democrats and Republicans alike, but usually earlier in the legislative process, the Post reports.
Mercy Hospital in Portland, ME, informed workers that 58 positions are being eliminated. President and CEO Eileen Skinner said some of those workers, mainly in administrative and support areas, will be able to reapply for other jobs in areas where the hospital is experiencing growth. Mercy is the third hospital in Maine to cut jobs this month. Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor announced it's laying off nearly 50 employees, including 23 nurses. And Pen Bay Healthcare in Rockland said it's cutting 10 positions.
Two dozen toga-wearing protesters retold the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar outside UPMC's Downtown headquarters on Monday—except the role of victims was given to community hospitals. The nonprofit group Save Our Community Hospitals wants to force UPMC to reopen its Braddock facility, which was closed Jan. 31. Organizers chose the Ides of March—March 15, the date Caesar was murdered in Rome in 44 B.C.—to stage their protest.
Declaring that "every argument has been made" on his healthcare overhaul, President Obama sought to seal the deal with Congress and the American people by focusing on a self-employed cleaning woman who dropped her costly insurance plan and just discovered she has leukemia. The president sought to turn the debate away from politics by reminding his party that people's lives were at stake. He also hinted that passing the healthcare bill as a critical test of Democrats' ability to govern, the New York Times reports.
After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote on the Senate's healthcare bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it, the Washington Post reports. Instead, the House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers "deem" the healthcare bill to be passed. The tactic—known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass"—is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a House vote, the Post reports.
A narrowly split Georgia Supreme Court has upheld a provision of the state's tort reform law that makes it extremely difficult for patients to recover damages in cases involving emergency room care. Plaintiffs' lawyers argued the law creates what is tantamount to an insurmountable legal threshold for patients injured by malpractice in hospital emergency rooms. But attorneys for hospitals and insurers contend the statute takes into account what happens in chaotic ERs, where doctors are often faced with life-or-death decisions without knowing their patients' medical histories, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.