With some top Democrats suggesting a temporary break from healthcare negotiations after the election of a Republican senator in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, President Obama said he would still push for a healthcare reform plan, although his party no longer has a filibuster-proof majority. Obama explained to an audience in Ohio that healthcare reform was part of his effort to address the economic security that has been eroding for most middle-class Americans, the Washington Post reports.
An election to decide which union will represent workers at Kaiser Permanente's Los Angeles Medical Center is scheduled for this week in a clash between giant Service Employees International Union and upstart National Union of Healthcare Workers. Leading NUHW's campaign are ex-union officers forced out when the SEIU asserted control over the California healthcare chapter a year ago, alleging mismanagement and fiscal irregularities. The new union has few resources compared with the SEIU, and does not yet have a single worker under contract, the Los Angeles Times reports.
When given the choice to either stop moonlighting as a paid speaker for pharmaceutical companies or quit his job at a top Harvard teaching hospital, Boston physician Lawrence M. DuBuske chose to resign from Brigham and Women's Hospital at the end of the month. Out of thousands of U.S. doctors hired by drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline to talk about its products, DuBuske was the highest paid during a three-month period last year, the company recently disclosed: He made $99,375 for giving 40 talks to other physicians last April, May, and June.
Tuition reimbursement was reinstated for the children of 1,500 unionized nurses and healthcare professionals at the Temple University Health System by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board.
About 150 members, whose dependents had been using the benefit, should be reimbursed about $1 million, said Bill Cruice, chief negotiator for the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals. On March 9, Temple University unilaterally discontinued the benefit without bargaining, and the union filed an unfair-labor-practice complaint the following day, according to the labor board's decision.
Most doctors don't talk about end-of-life issues with their cancer patients when those patients are feeling well, a new survey has found. They also do not talk about them until treatments have been exhausted, and the delays mean patients might not be able to make truly informed choices early in their treatment. The study surveyed 4,188 physicians about how they would talk to a hypothetical cancer patient with four to six months to live.
Aaron Shirley, MD, has devoted his career to serving the rural poor in the Mississippi Delta, but now the 77-year-old pediatrician believes the key to reducing the nation's highest infant mortality rates lies in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Los Angeles Times reports. In May, Shirley and two colleagues flew to Iran for 10 days to study a low-cost rural healthcare delivery system that, according to the World Health Organization, has helped cut infant deaths by 70% over the last three decades.