Willie Peterson II can't say enough good things about the home health care services he receives, or about Lynn Adams, the registered nurse who visits a few times a week to care for him at his Decatur, Ga., home. "If not for them, I'd be up the creek without a paddle," he said. Or in a nursing home. Peterson, 62, was paralyzed from the waist down by a falling tree in 1998 and needs regular skilled medical attention. Now he has personalized care that keeps him out of the hospital and feeling independent.
Assume that Cynthia Brown's audience, as she addressed the American Geriatrics Society's annual scientific meeting in Texas this month, already knew that hospitalized older adults spend too much time in bed. Her listeners — geriatricians, nurses, administrators — had probably observed for themselves how quickly elderly patients become deconditioned, how even a few days of "bed rest" causes loss of strength and muscle mass, while the risks of blood clots, bed sores and pneumonia increase. Dr. Brown, the director of geriatric medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been sounding this alarm for a decade.
MALTA — A new $17.5 million medical facility at Northway Exit 12 is part of a growing trend in the way health care is offered to local communities. Malta Med Emergent Care, a collaboration between Saratoga and Albany Medical Center hospitals, offers emergency-room type treatment for a variety of illnesses, from strokes and heart attacks to abdominal pain, flu, fever and allergies. Last October, Schenectady-based Ellis Hospital opened a similar, $18 million facility near Exit 9 called the Medical Center of Clifton Park. "Our goal is to provide the care people need close to home," Ellis spokesman Matt Van Pelt said.
More than 60 percent of poll respondents in Georgia and South Carolina favor expanding their state's Medicaid program to cover more people, while only a third approve of the health care reform law that would make it possible, a poll released Tuesday found. The results from five Southern states whose leaders oppose the reform law also reveal stark racial and class divisions. The poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies included 500 respondents each from Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, five states whose leaders oppose expanding their Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.
A bill introduced Thursday in the N.C. Senate would drastically reduce the tax breaks large nonprofit organizations receive on sales and use taxes. Senate Bill 677, dubbed the N.C. Fair Tax Act, is co-sponsored by Sen. Bob Rucho (R-Matthews). The bill includes an annual cap on the refund for sales and use taxes for nonprofits starting July 1, 2014. It would limit refunds to $5 million that year before dropping to $100,000 two years later. If passed, the legislation would mean large nonprofits, including Carolinas HealthCare System and Novant Health, will have to pay millions more each year in taxes.
In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously quipped: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." You could say the same thing about health care today. Spending on health care information technology has risen rapidly over the past decade, but there been little corresponding gain in health care productivity. Instead, the industry's labor force has been on a growth spurt — creating health care's version of a productivity paradox. Between 2003 and 2011, the health care sector nationwide added 2.67 million jobs while the entire rest of the U.S. economy added just 850,000 jobs, according to the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.