Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
State Highlights: Texas Community Still Grappling With Fallout After School Shooting; New York's Highest Court Knocks Down 'Soft Cap' On Insurers' Executive Pay
At a September school-board meeting in this rural town, a group of families stood before a lectern to recite the names of loved ones killed in a school shooting last May. When Scot Rice, whose wife Flo was shot five times that day, began reading the names of those injured, board president J.R. 鈥淩usty鈥 Norman interrupted to tell him his allotted time was up. 鈥淭here鈥檚 dead bodies between me and you,鈥 Mr. Rice shot back, as two police officers approached him. (Frosch and Hobbs, 10/24)
New York providers and health plans that contract with the state have fewer restrictions on how much they pay their executives, thanks to a recent ruling from New York state's highest court. They may pay executives more than $199,000 a year as long as they are not using state funds, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled last week. (Kacik, 10/23)
Governor Sununu unveiled a $24 million plan on Tuesday to tackle New Hampshire's nursing shortage. The Governor says he expects a major surplus in state funds this year and that the majority of it should go to expanding college nursing programs. (Gibson, 10/23)
Tens of millions of dollars in business and individual donations have gone to Georgia rural hospitals this year, thanks to a popular state tax credit program. But how hospitals are spending that money this year has not been officially tracked, the state says. And right now, there apparently isn鈥檛 publicly available information on how much in donations that each eligible hospital has received so far in 2018. (Miller, 10/23)
Fourteen more women accusing a former University of Southern California gynecologist of sexual misconduct sued the physician and the university on Tuesday, as their lawyer decried a proposed class-action settlement with the school as "grossly inadequate." Women's rights attorney Gloria Allred said the tentative $215 million deal reached last week to settle claims brought in federal court against Dr. George Tyndall and USC by his former patients would let the university off too easy, without the school fully accounting for its role in the scandal. (10/23)
John Boehner, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, challenged the healthcare industry to find a way to broaden access, improve quality and lower costs Monday during the Cleveland Clinic's聽2018 Medical Innovation Summit.聽"I know that's a Rubik's Cube I just gave you to solve," Boehner told Dr. Tom Mihaljevic, president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, during the keynote discussion at the Huntington Convention Center.聽(Christ, 10/23)
The number of Baltimore children with lead poisoning fell 19 percent in 2017, even as more children were tested for exposure to the powerful neurotoxin. Statewide, the number of Maryland children found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood held steady even as the number of children tested increased by 10 percent, according to a Maryland Department of the Environment report released Tuesday. (Dance, 10/23)
Friends and family members are urging leniency for a Texas woman convicted of attempted murder for withholding food and nutrients from her son. Danita Tutt was convicted last week but a jury acquitted her of two counts of injury to a child, which was related to allegations from prosecutors that Tutt had lied to doctors to subject the boy, now 13, to unneeded surgeries. (10/23)
The University of California and its largest employee union, AFSCME Local 3299, both came out throwing punches Tuesday as the university鈥檚 lowest-paid workers hit the picket line for the second time in six months to push for better wage increases and job security. Roughly 500 employees marched at Sacramento鈥檚 UC Davis Medical Center and chanted union slogans such as 鈥淲hat do we want? Contracts! When do we want them? Now!鈥 in a picket line that stretched down the block. (Anderson, 10/23)
A Unity Center for Behavioral Health employee claims he has been punished by the center's leaders for his public criticism of the facility's operations. Christopher Lambert filed a civil rights complaint Oct. 10 with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. Lambert was a nurse at Unity when it opened in February 2017. Over the next year and a half, he said he identified and reported issues of patient-on-patient violence, patient-on-staff violence, sexual assault and self-harm by patients. (Harbarger, 10/23)
An increase in traffic fatalities in the District is prompting Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and police to consider several new enforcement strategies, including restricting right turns on red and limiting left turns at some intersections to make roads safer. 鈥淲e are very concerned about people dying on the streets of Washington D.C., because of traffic collisions and we are especially concerned about those incidents where we think they are entirely preventable,鈥 Bowser (D) said in an interview Monday. 鈥淲e want to look at everything that the government can control 鈥 how we invest in improving intersections, how we help educate our public and how we enforce the rules of the road.鈥 (Lazo, 10/23)
Texas officials are requiring that the state's largest schools report concussions suffered by high school athletes in a move seen as the nation's biggest effort to track brain injuries among young athletes. The University Interscholastic League, Texas' governing body for public high school sports, on Monday ordered the schools to submit individual concussion reports. Texas has more high school athletes than any other state with about 825,000. (10/23)
Half of Texas men and 59 percent of the state's women say lawmakers need to push for more spending on health care, according to a survey released Tuesday. Also, nearly four in 10 Texas women report it's too difficult to get family planning or contraceptive services in the state, the survey by Houston's Episcopal Health Foundation and Kaiser Family Foundation found. The survey is part of a continuing project studying health care issues facing Texans. (Deam, 10/23)
Carol Alexander received a phone call from Sacramento County鈥檚 Meals on Wheels program last Friday and it wasn鈥檛 her usual case worker. Alexander, 83, said she was hit with a barrage of about a half-dozen questions she considered invasive or unnecessary: What is your sex? Do you still associate with your gender? Are you heterosexual? Are you white or Hispanic? 鈥淚 was in shock. I took offense to that,鈥 she said. (McGough and Dickman, 10/23)
Four years ago, the Roeland Park City Council fought a fierce battle over an ordinance to protect gay and transgender individuals from discrimination within the city. The measure died at one point and was only resurrected in August 2014 when the mayor cast the deciding vote. But now, northern Johnson County cities are lining up to give serious consideration to non-discrimination ordinances protecting the LGBTQ community, using the model from Roeland Park as well as from Manhattan, Kan., Lawrence and Wyandotte County. (Horsley, 10/23)
Three of the biggest local names in health care are partnering to expand their pediatric offerings and their reach 鈥 the latest effort by area hospital systems to spread services to wider swaths of Chicagoland. Advocate Children鈥檚 Hospital and NorthShore University HealthSystem, which teamed up on pediatric care earlier this year, began their new collaboration with University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children鈥檚 Hospital this month. (Schencker, 10/24)
More than 100 people have been sickened by hand, foot and mouth disease at one of Johns Hopkins University鈥檚 four Baltimore campuses. News outlets report that the Maryland Department of Health has classified it as an outbreak. University spokesman Dennis O鈥橲hea tells The Baltimore Sun that officials have been broadcasting information about the outbreak at the Homewood campus. The university says 129 cases have been reported since early September. (10/23)
An Orange County Superior Court judge Tuesday reversed an order barring journalists from reporting on a search warrant filed in the case against a Newport Beach surgeon facing felony charges of drugging and raping seven women dating to 2009. Grant Robicheaux, 38, once dubbed Orange County鈥檚 most eligible bachelor, and his girlfriend, Cerissa Riley, 31, are accused of rape by drugs, kidnapping, oral copulation by anesthesia, assault with intent to commit sexual offenses and other crimes. They have denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex. (Fry, Winton and Sclafani, 10/23)
Gathered above the north end zone of Memorial Stadium on Saturday stood three of the four living former University of Missouri football coaches: Warren Powers, Bob Stull and Gary Pinkel. Stull was as engaged as ever on a variety of topics, including how his prot茅g茅 Andy Reid is enjoying this Chiefs team. Wearing blue jeans, Pinkel exuded the opposite of his intense coaching persona as he spoke of such things as the 鈥渋t鈥 factor radiating from Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. (Gregorian, 10/23)