The New York Civil Liberties Union demanded that the state health commissioner withdraw a new regulation requiring hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers to get both seasonal and swine flu vaccinations. In testimony before several State Assembly committees in Lower Manhattan, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the civil liberties union, said that the requirement violated the constitutional right of healthcare workers to control their bodies and their medical treatment.
The Senate Finance Committee will hold a landmark vote on healthcare reform legislation on Oct. 13 and with few Republicans expected to support the bill, Democrats have already begun their own internal negotiations aimed at reconciling the various measures passed by House and Senate committees. Lawmakers are reviving ideas that had been discarded, including a new approach to a government insurance plan that appears to be gaining support with party moderates.
As the Senate Finance Committee prepares to pass its plan to overhaul the nation's healthcare system, senior Democrats are acknowledging that it may be impossible to provide coverage to all Americans, a central goal of President Obama and his congressional allies. That acknowledgment is fueling growing alarm among hospitals and insurance companies, which have made universal coverage a condition of their support.
As Congress moves to expand health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, it's doing little to ensure there will be enough primary care doctors to meet the expected surge in demand for treatment, experts say. "I don't see anything in the legislation that will greatly increase the primary care pipeline," Russell Robertson, MD, chairman of the Council on Graduate Medical Education, told Kaiser Health News. In addition to making sure patients have access to care, increasing the number and proportion of primary care doctors is crucial to lowering health costs, he said.
Consumer and health advocates gave California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger low marks for vetoing many health-related bills, but noted he signed several pieces of legislation expected to improve state residents' access to services, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. One of the bills the governor vetoed would have restricted the ability of health insurers to drop policyholders who the insurers maintain made a fraudulent claim to gain treatment, even if the basis of the fraud charge was a small or inadvertent error.
Margaret M. Van Bree has been appointed CEO of St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, and also will serve as senior vice president of St. Luke's Episcopal Health System, effective Oct. 5. Van Bree has served as senior vice president/COO at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison since 2007. She also held the same or similar roles since 1999 at the University of Virginia Health System and Fairview-University Medical Center in Minneapolis.