Until now, the focus at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has rightly been on the Ebola patients. But as more cases have sprung up, so has the question: Can the hospital itself recover? "I worry about the hospital being able to make it through this," says StatSeal representative Rachelle Cohorn, a healthcare vendor. She has been inside the hospital in recent days and reports, "The vibe is pretty much lockdown. It feels like a ghost town. No one is even walking around the hospital." Doctors confirm their patient loads at Presbyterian have fallen off dramatically as people cancel elective procedures. And the Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said patients have also been avoiding the hospital's emergency room.
The nation's largest nurses union is calling on President Obama to impose strict national standards to protect healthcare workers from the deadly Ebola virus, pointing to a lack of safety protocols. The appeal Wednesday for swift executive action comes as the second Ebola diagnosis of a U.S. healthcare worker stokes fresh fears among employee advocates and raises questions about the scope of the federal government's response to the crisis. "This month has been a nightmare for the nurses across the nation," National Nurses United (NNU) Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said. "They're looking for answers."
There's been a long-running theory that one reason medical costs are bloated is that doctors are scared of medical malpractice suits, so they order expensive and unnecessary tests to protect themselves from liability. But in three states over the past decade that enacted laws to put stricter limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, there hasn't been much of an impact in the volume or cost of emergency room care, a new Rand Corporation study shows. The finding suggests that doctors "are less motivated by legal risk than they themselves believe," casting doubt on the level of savings that could be achieved through medical malpractice reform, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.
While the Medicaid expansion may lead to a dramatic rise in emergency room use and hospitalizations for previously uninsured people, that increase is largely temporary and should not lead to a dramatic impact on state budgets, according to an analysis from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research released Wednesday. Researchers reviewed two years of claims data from nearly 200,000 Californians, including a group who had enrolled in public programs well in advance of the expansion of Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid, in January. These programs were designed to ease the expansion of Medicaid by providing insurance to low-income adults who were not eligible for Medi-Cal at that point but would be when the health law's expansion went into effect earlier this year.
Cancer tumors doctors couldn't touch may soon become fair game. Alex DeMetrick reports the University of Maryland will be the first East Coast medical center to offer cutting edge proton therapy. Inside the newest building at the University of Maryland Medical Center, technicians are working on some of the newest cancer technology?a proton therapy center. Like a small scale linear accelerator, it's still a city block long and designed to go after cancer tumors doctors can't normally treat. "It allows us to treat much larger tumors, much larger targets, much more complicated diseases. For example, head and neck cancer," said Dr. Minesh Mehta, director of the University of Maryland Proton Therapy Center.
Created in 1965, Medicare was intended to answer growing reports of impoverished seniors languishing or dying because they lacked health insurance. Since then, Medicare has acquired a reputation as the ultimate government entitlement, a system of low-cost, taxpayer subsidized health care provided at the stage in life when retirees need it most. But the broad-reaching health care insurance system comes with costs that many seniors – including those already using the plan – don't see until the bills show up. Those out-of-pocket expenses, according to experts, can range from hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums and office visit copays to six-figure bills for surgery and hospitalization for things like joint-replacement operations, a procedure common among older Americans.