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

Iowa News

Perry hospital leader picked to run West Des Moines medical center
The chief executive officer of the Dallas County Hospital has been chosen to run Mercy Medical Center-West Lakes in West Des Moines. Laurie Conner has led the Dallas County Hospital in Perry for 10 years. The public hospital, which is affiliated with the Mercy system, has 25 beds. Mercy Medical Center-West Lakes, a $100 million facility that opened last September, has 82 beds and could be expanded to 146 beds. (Des Moines Register)

Condon, 93, dies; founded House of Mercy
Sister Mary Brigid Condon, who was a leading nurse educator and co-founder of Des Moines’ House of Mercy center for women and children, died Thursday at a hospital in Aurora, Ill. Condon, 93, had already built a distinguished career in health care and education when she helped found the House of Mercy in 1988. (Des Moines Register)

Culver: Flooding is “new normal”
Iowa Gov. Chet Culver said today flooding is such a constant threat, the state needs to adopt a more intense long-term flood-fighting strategy. And he argued the controversial IJOBS initiative must continue, saying it’s pumped $300 million into flood-related projects. (Quad-City Times)

U.S. News

For insurers, fight is now over details
The law requires health insurers to spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar they collect in premiums on the welfare of patients, a critical issue for the companies’ bottom lines. But state regulators are only now deciding what precisely that means, as they draft the rules to enact the law. (New York Times)

Does Minnesota need all those back MRIs?
Doctors, hospitals and patients in the state have a well-established reputation for being thrifty when it comes to using expensive, high-tech health care. But those frugal ways apparently don’t apply to initial treatments for low-back pain, according to a new federal report. (St. Paul Pioneer Press)

Rose Ann DeMoro wants hospitals to scream
As head of the 155,000-member National Nurses United, DeMoro’s attitude toward hospitals and insurers (“They think I’m radical, that basically it’s unreasonable that I think that the nurses should win every battle, but I do.”) doesn’t suggest a demeanor amenable to shifting from agitator to stateswoman. Which means DeMoro’s opponents should expect lots more pain in the years ahead. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)

Where are the innovators in health care delivery?
Almost everyone believes there is an enormous amount of waste and inefficiency in health care. But why is that? In a normal market, wherever there is waste, entrepreneurs are likely to be in hot pursuit — figuring out ways to profit from its elimination by cost-reducing, quality-enhancing innovations. Why isn’t this happening in health care? As it turns out, there is a lot of innovation here. But all too often, it’s the wrong kind. (Kaiser Health News)

Health law augurs transfer of funds from old to young
Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare, younger workers have funded programs for the elderly. It’s a compact in which workers paid for retirees with the understanding that they’d be looked after by the generation behind them. The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. (Wall Street Journal)

Some insurers stop writing new coverage for kids
Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday. Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty said in his state UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have stopped issuing new policies that cover children individually. Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland said a couple of local insurers in her state have done likewise. (Associated Press)

Disabled see progress, but problems persist
Although problems persist, particularly in employment, the Americans with Disabilities Act has transformed the United States, improved the lives of the 50 million people with disabilities (half of them severely disabled) and served as a model for much of the rest of the world. (New York Times)

‘Villages’ let elderly grow old at home
The explosive growth of the USA’s older population is fueling a grass-roots “village” movement in neighborhoods across the country to help people age in their own homes. More than 50 villages in a neighbor-helping-neighbor system have sprouted in the past decade from California and Colorado to Nebraska and Massachusetts. (USA Today)