Plans for a new hospital campus hang like a shadow over New Orleans residents in the Tulane-Gravier neighborhood who were largely resigned to their neighborhood's fate. Residents pulled together to rebuild after Katrina--meeting on the neutral ground when there were no habitable buildings--and now stand to lose both their houses and their newfound sense of solidarity. The city, state and federal governments have announced their intention to demolish the neighborhood and build two teaching hospitals, which will be shared by Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in its place. The hospitals are to act as a means to revive the crippled healthcare system, reverse the exodus of doctors and inaugurate a new economy based on medical research and education.
Florida regulators have ordered Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg to stop giving dialysis treatments and have threatened to suspend hospital operations if safety problems aren't fixed. According to the regulators, the Northside's board and administration knew about problems with its dialysis unit but did nothing to fix them.
MilwaukeeCares, an initiative announced nearly three years ago to recruit volunteer doctors to treat uninsured patients in Milwaukee County, has drawn far fewer doctors than hoped. The Medical Society of Milwaukee County had hoped to persuade 80 percent to 90 percent of the estimated 4,000 physicians in the county to accept a few uninsured patients each month or even each year. Currently, less than 3 percent have volunteered.
Under a proposal in the Missouri General Assembly, ambulances transporting certain heart attack and stroke patients would would skip some facilities and go directly to the best-prepared hospitals. Under the state's current system, ambulances already bypass less-prepared hospitals to take severely injured patients to specially staffed and equipped trauma centers.
California Pacific Medical Center, which runs St. Luke's Hospital in San Francisco, announced in 2007 that it would close the hospital as an acute care institution within a few years, turning it into an outpatient hub. People suffering common acute illnesses such as heart attacks and pneumonia likely would be transferred elsewhere. Under such a scenario, medical care would be reshaped in the city.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed an initiative to pay off student loans for doctors as a reward for working in underserved areas. The proposal would set aside $2 million a year to create a physician loan repayment program that would help as many as 100 doctors each year. If the doctor stays in an underserved area for the minimum requirement of two years, 30 percent of the loan would be paid off, and payments would grow each year to the point where it would be paid off after five years.