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

Iowa News

ER nurse, patient killed in ambulance-semi crash
Hundreds in Carroll County’s emergency medical services and medical communities are in mourning after a collision Thursday that killed a nurse and patient and hurt two paramedics. (Carroll Daily Times Herald)

U.S. News

Lobbyists have long wish list for new health rules
Now that the health care bill is law, an array of groups — representing doctors, insurers, small businesses and others — have switched to their post-passage game plans. Among their top goals: Helping shape the all-important regulations being written by the Obama administration. Here’s a sampling of their priorities and who will be pushing them. (Kaiser Health News)

Stock market drop takes toll on hospitals
A new annual report from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council on the financial health of the state’s hospitals found that total margins, which include investment income, fell from 4.7 percent in fiscal 2008 to 2.08 percent in fiscal 2009. The average operating margin, which reflects only what hospitals earn from and spend on patient care, fell less, from 3.99 percent in fiscal 2008 to 3.52 percent last fiscal year. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Kerry comes to defense of nominee to run Medicare, Medicaid programs
Senator John F. Kerry rose to the defense of Harvard professor Donald Berwick yesterday, deriding Republicans who have used what Kerry called “phony assertions’’ to damage Berwick’s nomination to run the country’s Medicare and Medicaid programs.  “It’s no secret that the national Republican Party has tried to crank up the attack machine and make his nomination a distorted referendum on reform,’’ Kerry said.

Miami health system quality-of-care lawsuit can proceed
After a union lawyer announced that Jackson Health System staffers could prove that insured patients get better care than the uninsured, a judge on Thursday allowed to proceed part of a lawsuit that demands that the public health system establish a mechanism to “assure there is one standard of patient care.” (Miami Herald)

Physician pooling plan sparks fears in California
A California hospital trade association is developing a plan for hospitals to form a foundation that would supply them with doctors. Initially only about 20 of the association’s 160 member hospitals are expected to participate if the foundation launches, but the idea is already sparking concerns that it might drive up medical costs. (Wall Street Journal)

Hospital’s decision on CEO faces AG review
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said yesterday that it will review whether the board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center appropriately handled a “lapse of judgment’’ by its chief executive, Paul Levy, and whether charitable funds were misspent because of a personal relationship he had with an employee. (Boston Globe)

Lifesaving devices can cause havoc at life’s end
Defibrillators are a modern medical miracle, small implants that save lives by sending an electrical jolt to interrupt a potentially fatal heart rhythm and restore normal beating. But with a rapidly growing number of patients in this country getting the devices, they are increasingly posing a bionic challenge near life’s end, for both patients and their families. (New York Times)

He’s the poster child for patient empowerment
Dave deBronkart didn’t set out to change the world. All he wanted was a fighting chance to beat the cancer spreading through his body in January 2007. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)