Feds’ Health Spending to Double in a Decade

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
The federal government will spend twice as much on health care in 2017 as it did in 2007, as costs keep going up and as Boomers enroll in Medicare. The toll: federal outlays for Medicare and Medicaid will hit $1.5 trillion, up from $750 billion last year, according to [...]

More on airline passenger…

From CNN.com
American Airlines defended its staff as professional and its equipment as sound Monday after a swift review of a passenger’s in-flight death, despite her family’s claims that the crew ignored her pleas until it was too late.
Carine Desir, 44, was pronounced dead Friday on a nearly full Haiti-to-New York flight by a pediatrician who [...]

Cousin: Dying woman twice refused oxygen on flight

From CNN.com
“Don’t let me die,” the cousin, Antonio Oliver, recalled Desir saying after the attendant allegedly refused at first to administer the oxygen Friday.
But Desir did die, Oliver said Sunday in a telephone interview.
He said the flight attendant finally relented but various medical devices on the plane failed, including two oxygen tanks that were found [...]

Hospital cited in patient suicide

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
A Douglasville hospital failed to meet patient safety standards when a homeless man committed suicide in its emergency department, federal regulators have found.
The patient, evaluated as a suicide risk by WellStar Douglas Hospital staff, was not properly monitored for two hours and was then found hanging in his seclusion room, said [...]

Filipino nurses face criminal charges after quitting jobs caring for terminally ill children

From NC Times.com
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — For months, the nurses complained that they were subject to demeaning and unfair working conditions — not what they were promised when they came to America from the Philippines in search of a better life. So they abruptly quit.
But in doing so, they put more than their careers at risk: [...]

More Controversy: Luring Doctors and Nurses ‘A Crime’

From the NY Times
Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet. More than 13,000 doctors trained in sub-Saharan Africa are now practicing in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, leaving [...]

Controversial Article: Adding fuel to the doctor crisis

From MACLEANS:
An excerpt:
It’s been proven repeatedly—female doctors “will not work the same hours or have the same lifespan of contributions to the medical system as males,” says Dr. Brian Day, president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). Family duties are at least partly to blame. Day’s own wife and his sister-in-law, both trained physicians, haven’t [...]

Physicians Participating in OH Shortage Program Studied

From the Coshocton Tribune

CLEVELAND (AP) – Ohio’s program for foreign-born medical school graduates is not easing the state’s shortage of primary care doctors, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Monday.
 
Foreign-born doctors across the United States can apply for a visa waiver if they agree to practice in an underserved community for three years. Thousands of [...]

Cardiac Arrest in Hospital is Deadlier at Night

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
If you’re planning on going into cardiac arrest during your next hospital stay, try to do it on the day shift. You’ll have a better chance of surviving.
Researchers pored over data from nearly 87,000 cardiac arrests that occurred between 2000 and 2007, and found that 14.7% of patients whose [...]

Primary Care: Fewer US MDs, More Imported Docs

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
In the past decade, the number of U.S.-trained MDs working to become primary care docs has fallen. Sounds terrible, but the shortfall has been more than made up for by a growing number of osteopathic docs and foreign-trained MDs, a government report says.
 
After med school, doctors go through several [...]