Documents from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reveal it took Gaston Memorial Hospital staff some six hours to realize a nurse gave an emergency-room patient insulin instead of potassium. A spokeswoman with CaroMont Health, which operates the hospital, said the company may appeal some of the findings in the government's report as misleading, inaccurate, or based on insufficient facts.
Trustees at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center asked to consider a whopping $875,000 severance payout for its former CEO are balking at the package, sources told the Daily News. Some board members of the debt-burdened Bushwick hospital, which a state advisory panel has targeted for a three-way merger, have opposed paying 15 months of salary for former CEO Rajiv Garg. The hospital would also cover Garg's legal fees in an investigation of him and other former hospital higher-ups by the Brooklyn District Attorney.
Almost nothing that politicians are currently debating is likely to change the overall costs of care. What's merely at stake is the shell game about who appears to be paying. Hiding the redistribution inherent in American health care has a corrosive effect on our national dialogue.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan on Monday said it has asked a Detroit federal judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit by insurance giant Aetna Inc. Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna filed the lawsuit last month against the Blues, claiming the state's largest health insurer has prevented Aetna from expanding in Michigan. The lawsuit is a piggyback on the fall 2010 lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice and former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox that accuses the Blues of stifling competition and driving up rates for consumers through the use of certain requirements in hospital contracts that are called most-favored nation clauses.
California dominates the pay rankings for several lines of work, so it comes as no shock that California markets set the U.S. pace for health-care salaries. But Alaska? Its strong performance is much more surprising. On Numbers has analyzed compensation data for two closely related employment sectors—health-care practitioners and support staffers—in 406 metropolitan areas and divisions.
I didn't know much about the patient—just that he'd showed up on my floor the previous evening after some confusion about whether his room was ready. When I went into his room that morning, he was still asleep. I gently roused him while his doctor, who had followed me in, explained that he needed to do a physical exam. The patient, suddenly fully awake, challenged him: "Are you going to examine me or are you just going to stand there and talk about it?" His voice had an edge to it that, I'll reluctantly admit, scared me, especially when he quickly got up out of the bed and started yelling at the doctor and me.