State Highlights: Scathing Report Blasts Mass. Nursing Home Over Patient Deaths; Calif.’s New Aid-In-Dying Law In Practice

The Boston Globe: Blistering State Report Details Deaths At Brockton Nursing Home
The 70-page report into the deaths of that patient, in April, and another in March, paints a picture of a nursing home in chaos, with scant staff training in basic life-support care, machines needed to deliver life-saving oxygen standing empty, defective equipment used to restore a regular cardiac rhythm during a sudden heart attack, and missing alarms needed to protect dementia patients from wandering out of the building. (Lazar, 8/12)

The Associated Press: Terminally Ill Woman Holds Party Before Ending Her Life
In early July, Betsy Davis emailed her closest friends and relatives to invite them to a two-day party, telling them: “These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness and openness.” And just one rule: No crying in front of her.The 41-year-old artist with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, held the gathering to say goodbye before becoming one of the first Californians to take a lethal dose of drugs under the state’s new doctor-assisted suicide law for the terminally ill. (Watson, 8/11)

California Healthline: Licensing Logjam For California Nurses
Ivana Russo submitted her application for a California nursing license on April 22, nearly a month before she graduated from a nursing program at Brightwood College in San Diego. She expected it to take 10 to 12 weeks for the state to process her paperwork and authorize her to take the licensing exam. As of early August, 15 weeks later, the licensing board still had not reviewed her file and could not tell her when it would. Russo called the agency, often, to ask about the status of her application. It was hard to get a staff member on the phone. When she did, she said, “Every time I got a different story.” (Brown, 8/11)

Georgia Health News: Teachers, State Employees To See Modest Average Premium Hike
State employees, teachers and other people in Georgia’s employee benefit plan will face an average increase of 2.5 percent in their health insurance premiums starting in January.  “We think that’s a very reasonable’ average increase, considering the expected premium hikes in the general marketplace," said Commissioner Clyde Reese of the Department of Community Health on Thursday. The rates will vary depending on health plan choices, with some members of the State Health Benefit Plan (SHBP) actually seeing their premiums decrease in 2017, agency officials said. (Miller, 8/11)

Modern Healthcare: Transgender Bias Case Against Dignity Health Could Set Off Religious Freedom Clash
Dignity Health has answered a federal discrimination lawsuit filed by a transgender nurse by arguing that civil rights law does not require its self-insured employer health plan to cover gender reassignment-related care. It says Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not cover transgender status as a protected classification. The San Francisco-based hospital chain also argued last month in response to the closely watched suit—one of the first of its kind in the country—that HHS' May rule barring categorical exclusion of coverage for gender transition services does not take effect until Jan. 1, 2017. (Meyer, 8/10)

The Columbus Dispatch: Health Officials Say Diarrheal Disease Outbreak Spreading
Public-health officials are imploring area residents to obey a simple but crucial rule: If you're sick, stay out of the pool. Apparently, someone didn't get the memo. A diarrheal disease linked to swimming pools, splash pads and a water park is rapidly spreading across central Ohio, prompting public health officials Thursday to declare a community outbreak. (Neese, 8/11)

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Study: Bad Air In Philly Causes 126 Early Deaths, Hundreds Of ER Visits Annually
Each year in Philadelphia, an estimated 126 lives are cut short and 284 people are hospitalized due to excess air pollution, according to a report by the American Thoracic Society and New York University.The study attributed an additional 75 deaths in the Pennsylvania suburbs and 40 in Camden County to airborne contaminants. (Wood, 8/11)

Orlando Sentinel: Health-Care Changes In The Villages Leaves Some Scrambling For New Doctors 
Experts speculate there could be several motives behind the arrangement, although it's hard to know for sure. For one, Medicare is undergoing some changes that impacts how it pays doctors. However, the new provision won't have as much of an impact on Medicare Advantage, "so it's possible that they wanted to get out of some [of those] provisions," said Dr. Joseph Newhouse, John D. MacArthur professor of health policy and management at Harvard University. (Miller, 8/12)

New Orleans Times-Picayune: New Orleans Woman Gets 6+ Years For $3.3M Medicare Fraud Scheme 
The owner of a New Orleans medical supply company was sentenced Thursday (Aug. 11) to more than six and a half years in prison for running a scheme to bilk Medicaid out of $3.3 million, U.S. Attorney Ken Polite has announced. Tracy Richardson Brown, 46...was convicted in April on 18 counts of health care fraud, conspiracy and other charges. Evidence showed Brown paid people to hunt down Medicare beneficiaries whose information she then used to bill the federal program for wheelchairs, knee and back braces and other medical devices they didn't want or need. (Rainey, 8/11)

The Newnan Times-Herald: ​Zoning Approved, State OK Appealed For Behavioral Hospital
It’s one step forward and two steps back for the proposed Newnan Behavioral Hospital. The needed zoning approvals are now in place for the mental health facility, which would be located in the old Piedmont Newnan Hospital building on Hospital Road.But objections have been filed over the OK that the state recently granted to the hospital’s developers, Vest Newnan LLC/U.S. HealthVest. (Campbell, 8/10)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Organ Transplant Turns Life, Running Times Around For O'Fallon, Mo., Man 
It’s amazing what someone might consider a monumental reward. For Mark Mastroianni, 61, it was 4 minutes. That was the time he gained running a mile right after his kidney/pancreas transplant last year. “I had been running a 16 minute mile, and the first time I ran after the surgery, it was 12 minutes,” he said. “Now I’m down to 9 minutes.” Mastroianni got his transplant in July of last year. More than 30 years earlier, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. (Jackson, 8/11)

Georgia Health News: Saddleback Therapy: Horses Help With Healing On Ga. Farm
The horses at Butterfly Dreams Farm, a nonprofit therapeutic horseback-riding center, provide life-changing therapy to individuals as young as 2 years old with serious health needs and disabilities, including autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and mental illnesses. Military veterans and older adults also frequent the center. ...Vereen began practicing hippotherapy, a form of physical, occupational and speech therapy that uses a horse’s movements, in 1994 when she helped build a riding center to supplement traditional therapy services at St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens. (Fite, 8/11)

Stateline: With Push From Adoptees, States Open Access To Birth Records
For many years, adults adopted as children who wanted to find out who their birth parents were ran up against a brick wall because they had no legal right to simply get a copy of their original birth certificate in most states. But that’s been changing, as a growing number of states have been giving adult adoptees more — and in some cases, unrestricted — access to those records. (8/12)