A Cleveland jury has awarded $1.2 million to a woman who suffered second-degree burns to her face and neck during a botched plastic surgery.
Lauren Wargo, 20, was having a mole removed from her right eyebrow on Dec. 18, 2006, and was sedated and receiving oxygen from a face mask when the defendant, Bryan Michelow, MD, activated an electocautery "bovie," which started a fire in the operating room, according to the suit.
A Cuyahoga County Court jury believed Wargo's claim that Michelow and his corporation Contemporary Cosmetics, Inc., were negligent because he didn't tell the anesthesia assistant, who was controlling the oxygen, that he was going to use the bovie so that the anesthesia assistant would know to turn off the oxygen.
During the trial, Michelow blamed the anesthesia assistant, Cindy Kwit with Susan White Anesthesia Inc. The jury exonerated Kwit and found Michelow 100% responsible. Wargo received $875,000 in compensatory damages. The jury also awarded Wargo $425,000 in punitive damages after determining that Michelow allegedly tried to hide the cause of the fire.
It is not immediately clear if Michelow will appeal the verdict.
With an estimated 2.4 million workers having lost their health coverage provided through their jobs since the start of the recession, is now the time to start talking about a public plan option? According to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont), the answer is in due time.
"This is one of the 800-pound gorillas. Some say they will not support legislation without a new public insurance plan. I have told everybody that everything is on the table," Baucus said during a conference call introducing new reports from the Center for American Progress on the uninsured in the U.S.
But while "the public [plan] option is something I've kept on [the table], I've pushed it a little over on the side . . . We haven't reached that quite yet. I'm trying to gain momentum with other provisions," he said. "That's why I started with delivery system reform [at the first of three Senate Finance Committee roundtables on April 21]. But once we get to the public option, it's going to be a big debate."
The public plan option is on the minds of quite a few on Capitol Hill as seen last week when 16 Democratic senators—some considered more liberal and others more middle-of-the-road—sent a letter to Baucus and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee whose committees have oversight on healthcare reform.
The senators, including Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), James Webb (D- Va), Sherrod Brown (D-Oh), and Robert Casey (D-Pa.), wrote that they supported a public plan option as "a core component of this reform .... There is no reason to believe that private insurers alone will meet the public purpose of ensuring coverage for all Americans at an affordable price for taxpayers."
In the meantime, the country is looking at escalating numbers of Americans losing their jobs and health coverage, with about 1.3 million of these losses occurring in the last four months. This boils down to about an average of 10,680 workers a day, according to the center's reports.
But attention also needs to be paid to the fact that many people who don't have health insurance do have a job: 65% of uninsured adults in U.S. are employed, said the center's president, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta.
"However, the connection between having a job and having health insurance is breaking down in part because more and more employers cannot afford to cover their workers. Since 1999, the average employer contribution to healthcare has gone up by over 119%—and even adjusted for inflation, it's up over 80%," Podesta said.
Over the same period, the percentage of Americans with employer-sponsored insurance has declined from 67% to 63%, and "things are getting worse," Podesta said. "The rising number of working uninsured is a disturbing undercurrent and has certainly be accelerated by the recession."
The reports note that all industries except four—health services, natural resources and utilities, mining and government—showed declines in their payrolls in the past 15 months.
Physicians can play a major role in addressing healthcare reform issues such as coverage, according to Vivek Murthy. MD, president and co-founder of Doctors for America. Murthy, a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said at the teleconference that his year-old organization is not advocating a specific healthcare reform plan, "but we do think that a public plan is worth considering, and nothing should be take off the table at this moment."
"The key priority in whatever plan [that] is put forth is: does it really improve access for a patient and improve choice for a patient," he said. His group currently has nearly 12,000 supporters of healthcare reform nationwide.
A trio of hospitals in a Florida community will be among the latest to embrace smoke-free campuses this year, but a bumpy road may be ahead of them in terms of dealing with the practical repercussions of the transition.
The three hospitals involved, all in Panama City, FL, include Bay Medical Center, Gulf Coast Medical Center, and HealthSouth Emerald Coast Rehabilitation Hospital.
"All of the hospitals agreed the official day to go smoke-free is November 19, to coincide with the Great American Smokeout held by the American Cancer Society," says Christa Dean Hild, marketing manager for Bay Medical Center.
Between now and November 19, the hospitals will continue to raise awareness of the change—including offering smoking cessation courses—while also getting any necessary hospital policies revised to reflect the smoking ban, Hild adds.
"We want to give everybody plenty of notice," she says. One potential fall-out from hospital campus smoking bans is smokers heading to surrounding neighborhoods to light up. Some residents who live near medical facilities have complained about smokers congregating near their homes and tossing cigarette butts on their lawns.
The issue became contentious in Aspinwall, PA, last September after the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center St. Margaret banned smoking on its property. That move led to workers and patients—including at least one dragging an IV pole behind him—to head to nearby sidewalks that aren't part of the hospital campus, right in front of residential homes. Even graveyard-shift environmental services workers from the hospital stood alongside lawns at 3 a.m. for a smoke.
"It was nuts," says Ed Warchol, Aspinwall's borough manager. "These [residents] were getting hassled."
St. Margaret officials stood firmly behind their decision to ban smoking, which led neighbors to start a grass-roots campaign to raise media and government awareness of the problem. The borough and the hospital resolved the situation after the medical center found a sliver of state property abutting the hospital and designated it a smoking area, with the state's blessing. "It's literally under some tree," Warchol says.
St. Margaret has since posted signs around the hospital property pointing smokers to their proper spot.
Even well-established smoking bans on medical campuses can encounter hiccups occasionally. Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, IL, became a smoke-free environment on January 1, 2005. Smoking is prohibited on the entire campus, including parking lots.
Security officers ask anyone they find smoking in their cars in the parking lot to stop smoking or leave the property.
However, "there is pushback on it now and then," says Colette Urban, spokesperson for the Advocate Lutheran General.
The effort leading up to the hospital's 2005 cut-off was two years in the making, with gradual eliminations of smoking privileges, such as indoor smoking areas and smoking allowances for psychiatric patients.
Similar to the Panama City hospitals, Advocate Lutheran General provided staff members and patients with support programs and advice about how to quit smoking. The hospital also created scripts for employees to use with visitors and patients found smoking cigarettes.
Two key points in Advocate Lutheran General's success were promoting the administration's sponsorship of the new policy and anchoring the change to the hospital's mission statement.
Closing schools once a student falls ill with swine flu may no longer be worth the toll on students and families, because the illness will soon be present almost everywhere in the country and few cases have been severe, said representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new advice is part of a gradual easing of concerns over swine flu. While the disease has continued to spread across the and around the world, it is far less deadly than initially feared. And in Mexico, where the outbreak apparently had its origins, new cases have begun to ebb.
Senate leaders are working against a tightening calendar in tackling how to provide every American with health-insurance coverage and how to pay for it. Senate Finance Committee leaders want to have bipartisan legislation drafted by June that would remake the nation's healthcare system. But it is taking longer than expected to figure out how much each change will cost, or save, the government. Lawmakers must rely on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, confirmed that the estimates are taking longer than lawmakers would like.
In an effort to defuse an explosive issue in the debate over comprehensive healthcare legislation, a top Senate Democrat has proposed that any new government-run insurance program comply with all the rules and standards that apply to private insurance. The proposal was made by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, in a bid to address fears that a public program would drive private insurers from the market.
A bill expected to pass any day in the Pennsylvania legislature could help thousands of Pennsylvanians who have lost their health insurance and jobs recently with small businesses. The Governor's Office says 25% of Pennsylvanians employed in the private sector work for companies with two to 19 employees. Forty states, including New Jersey, have passed what is known as "mini-COBRA" legislation, which extends COBRA benefits to small businesses.
Tenet Healthcare reported a first-quarter profit on a one-time debt swap gain and higher overall revenue, despite a drop in the hospital operator's same-hospital admissions. Dallas-based Tenet says it earned $178 million, or 37 cents per share, compared with a loss of $31 million, or 6 cents per share, during the same period a year ago. Revenue rose 5% to $2.28 billion.
Pennsylvania-based Frankford Hospital has a new name: Aria Health. Maria Cerceo Slade, a health system spokeswoman, said Frankford needed a new name that would give it a "more regional brand" as it expands further into the Philadelphia suburbs. The hospital system, which serves Northeast Philadelphia and Bucks County, is made up of three acute-care hospitals, two Northeast Philadelphia outpatient centers, and a network of primary and specialty-care physicians' offices.
The United Auto Workers-aligned healthcare trust would work quickly to sell shares it would receive in a new Chrysler as soon as it in a position to do so, union President Ron Gettelfinger said. The UAW healthcare trust would receive a 55% stake in a new Chrysler, but no voting role on the board, under a sale plan the automaker filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
