Medicare Takes Aim At Boomerang Hospitalizations Of Nursing Home Patients “Oh my God, we dropped her!” Sandra Snipes said she heard the nursing home aides yell as she fell to the floor. She landed on her right side where her hip had recently been replaced. She cried out in pain. A hospital clinician later discovered her hip was dislocated. That was not the only injury Snipes, then 61, said she suffered in 2011 at Richmond Pines Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center in Hamlet, N.C. Nurses allegedly had been injecting her twice a day with a potent blood thinner despite written instructions to stop.
“She said, ‘I just feel so tired,’” her daughter, Laura Clark, said in an interview. “The nurses were saying she’s depressed and wasn’t doing her exercises. I said no, something is wrong.” Her children also discovered that Snipes’ surgical wound had become infected and infested with insects. Just 11 days after she arrived at the nursing home to heal from her hip surgery, she was back in the hospital. The fall and these other alleged lapses in care led Clark and the family to file a lawsuit against the nursing home.
Richmond Pines declined to discuss the case beyond saying it disputed the allegations at the time. The home agreed in 2017 to pay Snipes’ family $1.4 million to settle their lawsuit. While the confluence of complications in Snipes’ case was extreme, return trips from nursing homes to hospitals are far from unusual. With hospitals pushing patients out the door earlier, nursing homes are deluged with increasingly frail patients. But many homes, with their sometimes-skeletal medical
staffing, often fail to handle post -hospital complications — or create new problems by not heeding or receiving accurate hospital and physician instructions. Patients, caught in the middle, may suffer. One in 5 Medicare patients sent from the hospital to a nursing home boomerang back within 30 days, often for potentially preventable conditions such as dehydration, infections and medication errors, federal records show. Such rehospitalizations occur 27 percent more frequently than for the Medicare population at large….Read More
How America Got Hooked On A Deadly Drug An inside look at how Purdue Pharma pushed OxyContin despite risks of addiction and fatalities. Purdue Pharma left almost nothing to chance in its whirlwind marketing of its new painkiller OxyContin. From 1996 to 2002, Purdue pursued nearly every avenue in the drug supply and prescription sales chain — a strategy now cast as reckless and illegal in more than 1,500 federal civil lawsuits from communities in Florida to Wisconsin to California that allege the drug has fueled a national epidemic of addiction.
READ THE DOCUMENTS Click here to dive into Purdue’s internal budget documents from 1996 through 2002, a 2001 sales bonus program and more. Kaiser Health News is releasing years of Purdue’s internal budget documents and other records to offer readers a chance to evaluate how the privately held Connecticut company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch and promote the drug, a trove of information made publicly available here for the first time.
All of these internal Purdue records were obtained from a Florida attorney general’s office investigation of Purdue’s sales efforts that ended late in 2002. I have had copies of those records in my basement for years. I was a reporter at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which, along with the Orlando Sentinel, won a court battle to force the attorney general to release the company files in 2003. At the time, the SunSentinel was writing extensively about a growing tide of deaths
from prescription drugs such as OxyContin. We drew on the marketing files to write two articles, including one that exposed possible deceptive marketing of the drug. Now, given the disastrous arc of prescription drug abuse over the past decade and the stream of suits being filed — more than a dozen on some days — it seemed time for me to share these seminal documents that reveal the breadth and detail of Purdue’s efforts….Read More
Majority of Congress Failed to Support Retirees Last Year The Alliance for Retired Americans today released its 2017 voting record which scored every U.S. Representative and Senator on issues affecting current and future retirees. The annual report examined 10 key Senate and House votes in 2017, highlighting issues concerning the health and well being of retirees. Specific votes affected Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; prescription drug re-importation from Canada; the Affordable
Care Act; medical malpractice lawsuit caps; and tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, combined with tax increases for lower-income and middle class families, that increase income inequality. “The record of the Republican Senate leadership was particularly bad on retiree issues, and many members fell in line behind their leaders and against seniors. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (KY), Majority Whip John Cornyn (TX), Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (UT) and Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (WY) together took 40 votes on senior issues. Not a single vote could be considered pro-retiree,” said Robert Roach, Jr., President of the Alliance. “Our quality of life is under attack in Washington.” “Our Voting Record shows how committed each member of
Congress is to the needs of older Americans,” President Roach said. “It will help us to make informed voting choices in November.” Thirty-four members of the U.S. Senate achieved perfect scores of 100 percent in 2017, while another 40 received zeroes. In the U.S. House of Representatives, 178 members received perfect scores of 100 percent in 2017 while 191 received scores of zero.
Rhode Island Alliance for Retired Americans, Inc. • 94 Cleveland Street • North Providence, RI • 02904-3525 • 401-480-8381 riarajap@hotmail.com • http://www.facebook.com/groups/354516807278/