Rounding into the final stretch of the campaign, what has been a long year plus of promises on both sides now stand to become reality very soon — and for new plans like Obama's health-care proposal, business owners are thinking long and hard about what it will really mean for their bottom line. One small business owner is
already considering not adding any workers to his four pet-supply stores in anticipation of the contribution he'll have to make.
Though there aren't hard numbers yet, economists believe Obama's plan might make large and medium companies pay as much as 6 percent of their payrolls toward the health-care plan.
Giving up buttered grits for health care? As Alabama ballooned to take the #2 spot (right behind #1 ranked
Mississippi) in the national obesity rankings, the state
is cracking down on free health care payouts for state workers who are overweight. It's issued a get-slim-or-pay-up ultimatum for the nearly 40,000 workers on the state's insurance plan.
Wealthy countries where patients have access to diagnostic equipment
have higher cancer survival rates than their poorer counterparts. Using data from over two million cancer patients worldwide (from the 1990s), the first major study to compare global cancer survival rates found that the US, Australia, Canada, France, and Japan had the highest five-year survival rate. Algeria had the worst.
Video Shows Woman Dying on Brooklyn Hospital Floor
City hospital officials agreed in court Tuesday to implement reforms at a psychiatric ward where surveillance footage showed a woman falling from her chair, writhing on the floor and dying as workers failed to help for more than an hour. Esmin Green, 49, had been waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours when she toppled from her seat at 5:32 a.m. on June 19, falling face down on the floor.
NYC Planning Special Ambulance To Recover Organs In the hope of saving the lives of more people waiting for transplants, New York City is working on a plan to deploy a special ambulance to collect the bodies of people who have died suddenly from heart attacks, accidents and other emergencies and try to preserve their organs.
This week Oregon is
holding a lottery for the remaining 3,000 slots in their state health care system. That's right: a lottery. While the health care story dominating the headlines recently is the Hillary/Barack mandate debate, far more shocking stories just like this are plaguing the U.S.
Mississippi, the
fattest state in the Union, introduced a bill
last Friday that would ban some restaurants from serving anyone with a BMI over 30.
The bill,
HB 282, is sparking
uproar. Two of the bill's sponsors did have careers related to healthcare prior to becoming lawmakers.
A
study shows that waiting times in emergency rooms are long, and dangerously long at that.
Harvard Medical School reviewed data from over 92,000 emergency room visits, and found that in 2004, about a quarter of heart attack victims waited 50 minutes before receiving care. The average wait for a heart attack victim clocked in at about 20 minutes in 2004, up from eight minutes in 1997.
