Featuring hospital and health care headlines from the media and Web.

Iowa News

Auditor: Culver’s budget is likely illegal
Gov. Chet Culver’s proposed budget is at least $25 million above the state’s legal spending limits largely because of inaccurate calculations, State Auditor David Vaudt said this morning. A spokesman for Culver said the auditor “is simply wrong” and that, because this is an election year, “he is taking orders from the Republican Party of Iowa to try and influence this election as much as possible.” (Des Moines Register)

Local nurse travels to Haiti
Laurie Smith of West Liberty is a “real-life hero.” Smith is involved with World Wide Village, a St. Paul, MN-based nonprofit charitable organization. Its mission is to transform impoverished communities mainly by providing Christian education, health care, nutrition and micro enterprise opportunities to children and families across the world. (West Liberty Index)

Sedation team helps patients manage pain
Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines has created a way to keep patients, especially young ones, less anxious during certain diagnostic tests, enabling the medical staff to get clearer and more accurate results. Mercy is using a team approach to help children and adults ease through painful or unfamiliar medical tests and procedures. (Des Moines Register)

U.S. News

Massachusetts’ Problem and Maryland’s Solution
In 1977, Maryland decided that, rather than leaving prices to the vagaries of a marketplace where insurers and hospitals negotiate behind closed doors, it would delegate the task of setting reimbursement rates for acute-care hospitals to an independent agency, the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission. (The Health Care Blog)

The regulator from SEIU
Democrats Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln joined with Republicans to block cloture on a closely watched vote on the appointment of a lawyer for Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union to a seat on the National Labor Relations Board. As glaring was that only 52 Democratic Senators dared record their support for Craig Becker’s nomination. (Wall Street Journal)

Former hospital executive will plead guilty to paying kickbacks
A former top executive with Tustin Hospital and Medical Center has agreed to plead guilty to paying illegal kickbacks for patients recruited from L.A.’s skid row, according to papers filed Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Times)

Three ways text messaging can improve health care marketing
The hugely successful text-message fundraising campaigns to aid Haitian earthquake victims has shed new light on how organizations can harness the power of the SMS for good. Lately, I’ve been noticing an uptick in articles and press releases detailing text-message campaigns in healthcare – and each effort has a unique strategy that will help you further your marketing goals. (HealthLeaders Media)

Long-term care hospitals face little scrutiny
More than 400 similar facilities, called long-term acute care hospitals, have opened nationally in the last 25 years. Few of them have doctors on staff, and most are owned by for-profit companies. Lawsuits, state inspection reports and statistics deep in federal reports paint a troubling picture of the care offered at long-term care hospitals. (New York Times)

Study: too many with end-stage dementia get feeding tubes
Larger hospitals and those that are set up to make a profit are more likely to use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia, despite evidence that the practice does not prolong life or help with bed sores and other problems. (HealthDay)

FDA to increase oversight of medical radiation
The federal Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it would take steps to more stringently regulate three of the most potent forms of medical radiation, including increasingly popular CT scans, some of which deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest X-rays. (New York Times)