Mark your calendar — we’re meeting in St. Louis!
I’m pleased to announce that AHCJ’s annual conference will take place March 9-12 in the heart of the Midwest. We’ll gather in St. Louis’s historic Union Station Hotel, once the site of a railway station that brought crowds to the 1904 World’s Fair and was, at its peak, one of the busiest crossroads in the country.
Source: Analysis of the Fiscal Impact of Medicaid Expansion in Missouri, Center for Health Economics and Policy, Institute for Public Health, Washington University in St. Louis, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
Missouri voters in August approved a ballot measure that would expand Medicaid eligibility to include healthy adults, beginning July 1, 2021.
According to reporting at NPR by Alex Smith, 53.25% of 1.2 million voters approved the measure, meaning Missouri joins 36 other states and the District of Columbia in expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The approval came despite strong opposition from Republicans and rural voters, Smith wrote. Continue reading
On KBIA public radio, Jacob Fenston tells the story of a Missouri town faced with a brutal, impossibly high-stakes catch-22. For decades, thanks to pervasive pollution, the Doe Run lead smelter was slowly destroying Herculaneum physically. At the same time, that lead plant, the continent’s largest, was the only thing keeping Herculaneum afloat economically. Residents had to choose: fight the polluter and take their own livelihoods down in the process, or live with the pervasive, toxic lead dust and its consequences. Continue reading
If you haven’t already, take 90 seconds to read Tulsa World reporter Michael Overall’s brief, powerful account of how emergency preparedness translated to emergency action at the hospital caught in the center of the May tornado in Joplin, Mo.
Photo by Red Cross: Carl Manning GKCARC via Flickr
The staff had practiced severe weather drills and evacuations hundreds of times but, as one administrator told Oklahoma colleagues, “There’s no way you can plan for an F-5 tornado.” Nevertheless, Overall writes, the well-drilled staff of St. John’s hospital “evacuated all 183 patients in just 90 minutes with no major injuries,” a sentence you won’t appreciate until you read Overall’s narrative based on a hospital administrator’s talk at a conference for regional emergency workers.
For those of you looking for story ideas, you might look into local hospitals’ disaster plans. Have they really planned for every contingency? Certainly there are things no one can plan for, but it’s worth reading the story from this hospital and evaluating disaster plans with those events in mind.
For more, read AHCJ’s roundup and review of Joplin tornado coverage.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter (and Midwest Health Journalism Program Fellow) Jim Doyle has put together a series of stories on KV Pharmaceuticals that read like a primer on the confounding economics of drug manufacture and FDA approval. In the stories, especially the first and last installments, Doyle presents the big picture and helps readers understand why the systems work they way they do.
The first story shows how FDA approval could end up sending the price of a prenatal drug skyrocketing 16-fold and earn piles of money for a local pharmaceutical company. The second involves a U.S. District judge condemning a former head of that same company for “greed, abuse of power, recklessness.” Finally, he ends his tour of pharmaceutical avarice with a stern warning about the potential longterm costs, both monetary and medical, that could result from the fast-track approval of the drug whose approval formed the basis of the first story. For lots more about KV Pharmaceuticals, be sure to check the “Related Reading” box on this page.
Further reading
If you’re looking for more on KV Pharmaceuticals and the Orphan Drug Act, check out Ed Silverman’s post on Pharmalot. There, he interviews a nonprofit advocate who helps explain how KV’s manipulations were possible, how it could happen again and how the act should be modified.
