A lawmaker has filed a bill seeking to limit Florida's authority to operate a Medicaid privatization experiment even as state officials have begun to take a stand against the troubled pilot program. The proposal seeks to revoke the Agency for Health Care Administration's power to get money from the federal agency which helps fund the pilot program. Rep. Elaine Schwartz, D-Hollywood, filed the proposal and said her office is flooded with residents who can't get doctor's appointments and medicine.
Two intensive-care patients at Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago recently died after becoming infected with a common bacterium sometimes found in intensive-care units. Officials learned Feb. 23 that four patients in the hospital's ICU were infected with acinetobacter, the hospital said in a statement. Before the outbreak was contained, seven of the ward's 10 patients were infected. Hospital spokeswoman Sharon Thurman confirmed Monday that two of the patients later died. It is unclear whether the bacterial infections contributed to the two deaths at Roseland.
Cancer doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital plan within a year to read the genetic fingerprints of nearly all new patients' tumors to customize treatment. The goal is to spare patients from the traditional approach to cancer care, when expensive drugs with harmful side effects are often given without knowing whether they will work.
As a conversation about healthcare reform intensifies, much of the focus is on the role the government and insurance companies will play in a revamped health system. But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the role that patients and their doctors have played in shaping the way medical care is delivered, according to this article in the New York Times. Ultimately, for any reform to work, patients will have to change their behavior, the article states.
Dentists are in such short supply in Maine that primary care doctors who do their medical residency in the state are learning to perform basic dental skills through a program that began in 2005. In Maine, training physicians in dentistry provides a dental safety net for the rural poor who have never had one, doctors and dentists said. About two-thirds of the residents who have trained at the dental clinic now practice in the state, many in rural areas.
A full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty is intent on exposing and curtailing drug industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard's 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes. They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school's world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching. The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.