Testing of more than 3,000 people who may have been infected with hepatitis C at a New Hampshire by an alleged "serial infector" was canceled this weekend, leaving some former patients scared and angry. Health officials cancelled the weekend testing clinic, even though they asked the former patients at Exeter Hospital to get tested, because they said the logistics were too much. David Kwiatkowski, a former lab technician at Exeter Hospital, was indicted last week for allegedly infecting 31 people with hepatitis C at that hospital, but might have infected thousands of patients in at least 13 hospitals where he has worked.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday renewed his criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts' reasoning in upholding President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law and also said the Constitution undoubtedly permits some gun control. Scalia joined in a sharply worded dissent on the day of the June 28 ruling and added to his criticism on Sunday."There is no way to regard this penalty as a tax. ... In order to save the constitutionality, you cannot give the text a meaning it will not bear," Scalia said. "You don't interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can't be a pig."
The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the healthcare law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000. Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.
The Supreme Court may have declared that the government can order Americans to get health insurance, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sign up. Nowhere is that more evident than Oklahoma, a conservative state with an independent streak and a disdain for the strong arm of government. The state cannot even get residents to comply with car insurance laws; roughly a quarter of the drivers here lack it, one of the highest rates in the country. When it comes to health insurance, the effort to sign people up isn’t likely to get much help from the state. Antipathy toward President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul runs so deep that when the federal government awarded Oklahoma a large grant to plan for the new law, the governor turned away the money — all $54 million of it.
The former Exeter Hospital medical technician accused in a hepatitis C outbreak was fired from a hospital in Pennsylvania in 2008, and again in 2010 while working at an Arizona hospital, where he was discovered unresponsive in a locker room with syringes and needles on him. David Kwiatkowski, 33, was fired in 2010 after working as a radiation technician for 11 days at Arizona Heart Hospital in Phoenix, according to a hospital statement. Two years earlier, he was let go from his contract job as a radiology technician at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh in 2008 after the hospital said he was found in an area where he wasn't assigned.
McKesson Corp. will pay $151 million to 29 states and the District of Columbia to settle a lawsuit alleging the company inflated prices of hundreds of prescription drugs, causing state Medicaid programs to overpay millions of dollars in reimbursements, officials said Friday. The agreement with San Francisco-based McKesson, one of the country's largest drug wholesalers, settles allegations the company deliberately inflated drug prices by as much as 25 percent from 2001 to 2009. An investigation by state and federal agencies found that McKesson overbilled for more than 1,400 brand-name drugs from 2001 to 2009.