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

Iowa News

WMC provides $3.8 million in uncompensated care and health care services annually
Winneshiek Medical Center provides $3,849,743 in community benefits to the Northeast Iowa region, according to a recently completed assessment of those programs and services.  That amount, based on 2010 figures, includes $3,180,600 in uncompensated care and $669,143 in free or discounted community benefits WMC implemented to help Northeast Iowa residents. (Decorah Newspapers)

Opinions heard on mental health reform
Advocates and consumers gave their input Friday on the planned redesign of Iowa’s mental health and disability services system. A public forum on the topic — the fifth in the state — was held at Iowa Western Community College. Iowa Department of Human Services Director Charles Palmer gave attendees a peek at a proposal to go to a regional system from the current county-based system. A bill passed by the Legislature repeals the current system on July 1, 2013, he said. “We’re playing without a net,” he said. “So unless somebody puts something into place, there’s not a system a year from July. So the onus is on the Legislature to get something done.” (Council Bluffs Nonpareil)

National News

Health care leads U.S. job growth in September
The health care sector is creating jobs at a pace not seen in four years and is responsible for nearly one in four new jobs in the overall economy so far in 2011, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show. Through the first three quarters of 2011, healthcare created 258,000 jobs – nearly as many as the 263,400 healthcare jobs created in all of 2010. Healthcare is on a pace to create 344,000 new jobs by year’s end, a level of growth last seen in 2007, when the sector created 347,800 jobs, according to the BLS. (HealthLeaders Media)

AHA lobbies Congress for ‘shared sacrifice’
“It’s the theme of shared sacrifice,” AHA Executive Vice President Rick Pollack told HealthLeaders Media. “If we are going to tackle these major problems, you can’t keep going back to the same well. It is everybody’s responsibility to step up to the plate in the name of shared sacrifice.” “Cutting providers and rationing the provider payments doesn’t represent reform. It represents the same old, same old. Cutting providers eventually does harm beneficiaries,” he says. “If we have this big national problem, shouldn’t everyone be part of solving it?” (HealthLeaders Media)

An innovator shapes an empire
Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, 54, has been chancellor for a little more than two years. She came to the University of California-San Francisco after a stunningly successful career in the pharmaceutical industry. University officials invited her to apply for the job. She is the first woman to lead the university, and the first chancellor from outside the ivory towers of academia. The university is widely regarded among scientists as one of the nation’s crown jewels of biomedical research, and a birthplace of biotechnology and innovation. But the public knows it less well, and Dr. Desmond-Hellmann wants to make U.C.S.F. as famous as the Mayo Clinic. (New York Times)

Do programs that pay people to lose weight really work?
What if someone would pay you to lose weight? Not a token amount from your meddling fitness freak brother-in-law, but serious cash, say $10,000? Would you try it? But what if you had to put some skin in the game, 60 of your hard-earned dollars for the chance to win that $10,000 or smaller prizes of $5,000 and $3,000? And what if you had to do this at the office, with a team of co-workers who would monitor your progress, or lack thereof, and whose chances at a payoff depended on you? Deal breaker or motivator? (Washington Post)