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a superlative idea! Let's throw thousands of construction workers out of work and make it harder to access quality medical care at the same time. Man, those Democrats are 6 times brilliant, eh? The Weekly Standard: Under the headline, "Construction Stops at Physician Hospitals," Politico reports today that "Physician Hospitals of America says that construction had to stop at 45 hospitals nationwide or they would not be able to bill Medicare for treatments." Stopping construction at doctor-owned hospitals might not seem like the best way to boost the economy or to promote greater access and choice in health care, but...

January 04, 2011 Obamacare stops construction at 45 physician owned hospitals nationwideRick Moran What a superlative idea! Let's throw thousands of construction workers out of work and make it harder to access quality medical care at the same time. Man, those Democrats are 6 times brilliant, eh? The Weekly Standard: Under the headline, "Construction Stops at Physician Hospitals," Politico reports today that "Physician Hospitals of America says that construction had to stop at 45 hospitals nationwide or they would not be able to bill Medicare for treatments." Stopping construction at doctor-owned hospitals might not seem like the best way to...

Physician Hospitals of America says that construction had to stop at 45 hospitals nationwide or they would not be able to bill Medicare for treatments." Stopping construction at doctor-owned hospitals might not seem like the best way to boost the economy or to promote greater access and choice in health care, but that exactly what Obamacare is doing. "Section 6001 of the health care law effectively bans new physician-owned hospitals (POHs) from starting up, and it keeps existing ones from expanding." American Hospital Association ... the AHA, along with Sen. [Max] Baucus (D-MT) and Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), are responsible...

Feds asked to ensure Catholic hospitals follow lawThe American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women. By Rob Stein The Washington Post Originally published Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:00 PM The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women, saying the refusal by religiously affiliated hospitals to provide abortion and other services is an increasing problem. In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the ACLU...

Interesting piece on managing wait-times in Canada: On Monday, Auditor General Jim McCarter released his annual report which found that despite putting an extra $200 million into shortening emergency room wait times over the last two years, "significant province-wide progress has not yet been made." "Complaints about overcrowding and delays in hospital emergency rooms have persisted for years," McCarter told a news conference on Monday. Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province's 8-hour wait time target, the report found. And for emergency patients...

Which do you think is less expensive, not to mention preferable: a cure for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes, or caring for people with these diseases? Wouldn't it be better medical and public policy to direct more resources toward finding a cure for diseases that cost a lot to treat than to rely on a government insurance program, such as Obamacare, which seeks mainly to help pay the bills for people after they become ill? Isn't the answer obvious? Apparently not to many politicians trapped in an old paradigm that focuses too much on hospitals, doctors and medicines and too...

Senior IDF officials were among those at a conference on humanitarian medicine held this week in Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. IDF commanders and soldiers were there to hear about recent developments and challenges in the IDF. Brigadier-General Nitzan Alon, Commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, said Israel had faced a unique humanitarian challenge in recent years. When a terror war broke out in 2000 and PA terrorists began attacking Israel more frequently than ever, Israel was forced to limit PA Arabs' access to Israeli cities, he said, leading to a situation in which PA Arabs were no longer...

Adverse Events in Hospitals: National Incidence Among Medicare Beneficiaries {Excerpted] OBJECTIVES To estimate the national incidence of adverse events for hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries, assess the preventability of such events, and estimate associated costs to Medicare. Findings: An estimated 13.5 percent of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries experienced adverse events during their hospital stays. An additional 13.5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries experienced events during their hospital stays that resulted in temporary harm. Physician reviewers determined that 44 percent of adverse and temporary harm events were clearly or likely preventable. Hospital care associated with adverse events and temporary harm events cost Medicare an estimated...

The inquiry, announced by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in June, aims to build on the work of an earlier independent investigation into the care provided by Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust between 2005 and 2009. [Snip] That inquiry [Snip] identified systemic failings at the hospital, where managers were preoccupied with cost-cutting and Government targets. [Snip] Appalling standards put patients at risk and between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period [Snip] the new inquiry would be held in public in order to combat "a culture of secrecy" and restore public confidence.

Hospitals are putting more patients into observation status for longer than 48 hours instead admitting them, in part out of fear of what happened at one hospital this month, the American Hospital Association says. Observation status is a Medicare billing category for patients not sick enough to qualify for acute admission but too sick to be sent home. Fear of Recovery Audit Contractor audits, or "post-payment reviews of inpatient claims" has been partly responsible, said Rick Pollack, AHA executive vice president, in a letter to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services chief operating officer Marilyn Tavenner on Wednesday. "A related...

Hand surgeon Frederic Liss sees the new doctor-owned hospital that he and 24 fellow physicians are about to open in Royersford as just what the country's troubled health-care system needs, even though the recent health-reform law takes a decidedly different view. The 12-bed, five-operating-room, multispecialty surgical hospital will compete with two nearby for-profit hospitals, and that, Liss said, will drive innovation and give patients more choices. He said there was evidence patients prefer physician-owned hospitals and have been less likely to pick up infections there. [...] Foes of physician-owned hospitals dominated during the health-reform debate and won new rules that...

Dr. Victor Grigoriev had good news for Georganne Mumm's worried family when he emerged from the operating room. The surgery was a success, Mumm says he told her family. He had removed her cancerous kidney and her outlook was good. Mumm said her family embraced Grigoriev, a University of Nevada School of Medicine professor and a leader in the Las Vegas medical community. But that wasn't the complete story of what had happened in a MountainView Hospital operating room on Sept. 4, 2007, records show. Grigoriev mistook part of the 53-year-old's pancreas for a cancerous mass and cut it out,...

Thirty-five weeks pregnant, Robin Rodgers was vomiting and losing weight, so her doctor hospitalized her and ordered that she be fed through a tube until the birth of her daughter. But in a mistake that stemmed from years of lax federal oversight of medical devices, the hospital mixed up the tubes. Instead of snaking a tube through Ms. Rodgers’s nose and into her stomach, the nurse instead coupled the liquid-food bag to a tube that entered a vein. “And she said, ‘Oh, Mom, she’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know, but now we have to take care of you,’ ”...

WHEELING - The issue of Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement could become a weighty issue with employees at Ohio Valley Medical Center and East Ohio Regional Hospital. The employees were informed by letter this week of a proposal currently before the Health Care Reform Bill Commission. That proposal would cut Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to hospitals where more than 5 percent of hospital employees are found to be 25 percent heavier than generally accepted height and weight guidelines.

A new superbug that is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics has entered UK hospitals, experts warn. They say bacteria which make an enzyme called NDM-1 travelled back with NHS patients who had gone abroad to countries like India and Pakistan for treatments such as cosmetic surgery. Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the UK so far, scientists fear it will go global. Tight surveillance and new drugs are needed says Lancet Infectious Diseases. NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of...

When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease. Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the...

Published: 07.19.10, 13:18 / Israel News Hezbollah has deployed more than 5,000 fighters in southern Lebanon villages bordering Israel, the World Tribune newspaper reported. According to the report, Hezbollah fighters seized positions in houses, schools and hospitals and are engaged in observation and collecting intelligence. The source of the report is unclear. (Roee Nahmias)

NEW YORK, July 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “Rights for me, but not for thee” seems to be the theme of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) latest duel with the U.S. Catholic Church. In an effort to get the federal government to mandate abortion as an emergency medical service in certain situations, the group has sent a letter to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services demanding it investigate Catholic hospitals for “potential violations” of U.S. law by failing to provide what the organization asserts are “life-saving” abortions."The government must ensure that the well-being of the patient does not take...

Even before the doors opened on the $1.02-billion Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center many observers warned that the new hospital was too small. Now, more than a year and a half of experience appears to confirm it. The overcrowding has become so intense that health officials asked county Supervisor Gloria Molina eight months ago what she would think if the hospital began placing patients in the hallways, the supervisor recalled in an interview. "I said, 'Absolutely not. We will not have patients in the hallway,' " Molina said. Instead, County- USC officials have increased patient transfers to other hospitals. Despite...

During past recessions, the financial stability of hospitals seemed to be nearly indestructible. But researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and St. Joseph Mercy Health System say the current national economic crisis may be an exception. Hospitals are reporting declining profits, likely as a result of Americans losing health insurance as they lose jobs. As a result, hospital plans for renovation and new construction are being scrapped, and hospitals are being forced to reduce hospital staff, according to an analysis in the just-released May/June issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The researchers speculate hospital cutbacks may risk...