4 Former Staffers Face Charges Over Nursing Home Deaths After Hurricane Irma
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Brakkton Booker &
Greg Allen
NPR
Three people turned themselves in to police Monday to face criminal charges in connection with the deaths of a dozen patients at a South Florida rehabilitation facility days after Hurricane Irma in 2017. A fourth person was arrested by authorities in Miami-Dade County. Those charged all worked at the
Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills when the storm knocked out a transformer that supplied power to the facility's air conditioning system. Eight people died on Sept. 13, 2017. And though the center was evacuated that same day, four more deaths occurred in the ensuing weeks. A total of 14 nursing home residents died.
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Dialysis Industry Spends Big to Protect Profits
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Harriet Blair Rowan |
KHN
The dialysis industry spent about $2.5 million in California on lobbying and campaign contributions in the first half of this year in its ongoing battle to thwart regulation, according to a California Healthline analysis of campaign finance reports filed with the state. Last year, dialysis companies poured a record-breaking $111 million into a campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have capped their profits. This year's political spending, which includes an online and broadcast advertising blitz, is aimed at killing a bill in the state legislature that would disrupt the industry's business model - and likely reduce its profits. The dialysis industry counters that the bill would threaten some low-income patients' access to the lifesaving treatment.
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Johnson & Johnson must pay over $572 million for its role in Oklahoma opioid crisis, judge rules
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An Oklahoma judge on Monday ordered
Johnson & Johnson to pay over $572 million for pushing doctors to prescribe opioids while downplaying the risks of addiction,
 actions that state prosecutors said helped fuel the state's opioid epidemic and led to more than 6,000 deaths over nearly two decades.
Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter claimed in court that the sales push by Johnson & Johnson and its pharmaceutical subsidiary,
Janssen, starting in the 1990s had created "a public nuisance" that led to the deaths.
J&J denied any wrongdoing, and its attorney,
John Sparks, said state prosecutors had misinterpreted the public nuisance law, having previously limited it to disputes involving property or public spaces.
Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman disagreed, and said that Johnson & Johnson's "misleading marketing and promotion of opioids created a nuisance" in the state.
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The public health solution to gun deaths
Nancy Dodson, MD, MPH, Jeffrey Oestreicher, MD & Nina Agrawal, MD | KevinMD
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Last year, the
National Rifle Association chided physicians to "stay in their lane" when it comes to gun violence. Our lane. We responded, sharing images on Twitter of bloody trauma bays and blood-soaked scrubs. Memories were stirred, like the night one of us spent in an emergency room, waiting for foster care to be arranged for an infant and toddler who were orphaned after the murder-suicide of their parents. Or the time we sat with a grieving mother whose only surviving son was murdered by a gun just two years after his brother was gunned down on the same block. And now, just days after a string of mass shootings, we find ourselves again compelled to speak out. To claim that gun violence is outside the scope of health professionals is bewildering and incendiary. Not only because it's clinicians - not the
NRA - who bear the responsibility of telling families of the nearly 40,000 gunshot victims each year that their loved ones aren't coming home, but because providers have a unique role to play alongside communities, policymakers, and industry to reduce gun deaths in a nation with the highest rates of gun violence in the developed world.
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Inside FloridaHealthIndustry.com
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