Category: YOUR HEALTH
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Health agencies in Rockcastle, Jackson, Clay, Harlan to lose 14 employees, some environmental and food-safety inspections
In the latest example of Medicaid changes’ impact on local health departments, environmental and food-safety inspections will be reduced by layoffs in four counties served by the Cumberland Valley District...
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Danville newspaper examines problems hospitals and doctors have with state’s managed-care Medicaid program
All the talk about “Obamacare” may have obscured Kentucky’s biggest health-care story, Kendra Peek of The Advocate-Messenger in Danville suggests, in a look at Kentucky’s troublesome shift to managed-care Medicaid....
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Fiscal-cliff deal revives program that helps rural hospitals dependent on Medicare; 200 in nation, 10 in Kentucky
Even though most of the hospital industry wasn’t happy with the fiscal-cliff deal that will only pay half the $30 billion needed to avoid a 27 percent Medicare fee cut...
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Painkiller epidemic was driven in part by drug makers’ financial relationships with researchers who discounted the risks
For almost a decade, medical officials and experts claimed OxyContin rarely posed problems of addiction for patients. The drug’s label, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, said addiction...
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Health reform drives hospital mergers and affiliations, and makes clinical collaborations more important
Is your community’s hospital one of the many rural hospitals considering sale, merger or affiliation with a larger hospital or group of hospitals, all options that are becoming more common,...
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Chart shows how to get coverage under federal health reform
The core of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is helping people get health insurance, beginning next year. That will be relatively simple for some people, but complicated for...
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UK has its pediatric heart program under review; chief is on leave, and patients are being referred to other hospitals
Kentucky Children’s Hospital at the University of Kentucky is reviewing its cardio-thoracic surgery program and referring surgical patients to other hospitals, “but the reasons why are unclear,” Brenna Angel reported...
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Generic OxyContin and Opana, headed for market soon, could make fight against pain-pill abuse tougher, McConnell says
With generic versions of the two most commonly-abused painkillers, Opana and OxyContin, coming on the market next year, police, hospitals and health clinics in Kentucky have voiced concern that “these...
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Group of 550 doctors in Central Ky. leaving Medicaid’s Coventry
A Lexington-area network of doctors says it will no longer contract with Coventry Cares, a Medicaid managed-care company, after Coventry said “it would begin to pay less than the established...
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Deaths from drug overdoses in Kentucky hit new high in 2010; more than half involved prescription drugs
Deaths from drug overdoses in Kentucky jumped to a new high in 2010, and “rose a staggering 296 percent from 2000 to 2010,” Bill Estep of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. “A...