Medics from Colerain Township in Ohio tending to a patient. Which hospital a person is taken to could make a significant difference in the medical outcome, according to a new study.
Credit: Ty Wright for The New York Times
Not all hospitals are created equal, and the differences in quality can be a matter of life or death.
In the first comprehensive study comparing how well individual hospitals treated a variety of medical conditions, researchers found that patients at the worst American hospitals were three times more likely to die and 13 times more likely to have medical complications than if they visited one of the best hospitals.
The study, published Wednesday in the academic journal PLOS One, shows “there is considerable variation in outcomes that really matter to patients, from hospital to hospital, as well as region to region,” said Dr. Thomas H. Lee, a longtime health care executive who was not involved in the research.
Ben Dunkle, who died of a heroin overdose, with his mother Aimee, who started Solace Foundation in southern California to distribute naloxone after his death.
Credit: the Dunkle family
Ben Dunkle died at the age of 20, abandoned in a carpark by panicked friends who had no idea how to save his life as he overdosed on heroin.
“I’m certain that if they had been carrying naloxone, they wouldn’t have run away,” said his mother, Aimee Dunkle.
After Ben’s death, Aimee made it a mission to get naloxone, an antidote that can bring overdosing opioid users back from the brink of death within minutes, into the hands of as many people as she could. In February she founded the Solace Foundation in southern California to distribute the naloxone among addicts, many of them homeless, their relatives and friends. She says the group has saved at least 365 lives.
But Dunkle said she could have saved more if it were not for the surging cost of the drug which has prompted accusations of pharmaceutical companies […]
Republican former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory come to Trump Tower to kiss the new emperor’s ring and swear fealty.
Credit: AFP
NORTH CAROLINA — Last month, Democrat Roy Cooper unseated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, while Democrats also gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, breaking the Republican stranglehold on North Carolina’s state government. Now, though, Republicans have used the pretext of a lame-duck special legislative session—ostensibly convened for disaster relief—to advance a slew of measures that radically curtail the authority of the governor and even the high court itself. This nakedly partisan plot is unprecedented in modern state history. Indeed, you have to go back to the 1890s to find a parallel, when reactionaries violently introduced Jim Crow after a multiracial coalition of progressives briefly won power.
The scope of the GOP’s war on democracy is stunning. In this special session, Republicans enacted a new law that removes the governor’s party’s control over all the state and county boards of election. That same measure also makes previously nonpartisan state Supreme Court races […]
David Friedman, named by Donald Trump as his Ambassador to Israel, is ideologically to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Credit: Bradley C. Bower/Bloomberg
Every morning since November 9th, you wake up and read the news and think, This has got to be an issue of The Onion. Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.
And so every day brings at least one fresh outrage: the appointment of a national-security adviser whose temperament resembles those of the unhinged generals in “Dr. Strangelove”; a keeper of the environment who denies the science of climate change; a chief strategist and senior counselor who ran a Web site laced with racist poison […]
The bizarre Sean Hannity-WikiLeaks bromance has now only grown more loving.
On Thursday afternoon, Hannity, the Fox News host and informal Trump adviser, once again interviewed WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange—this time on Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show. Hannity gave Assange a large platform to deny that the source of the DNC and John Podesta emails was the Russian government, and to also join Hannity in some fairly typical bashing of Hillary Clinton and the “liberal” mainstream media.
Hannity, who could barely contain his excitement to have Assange on the program, had teased the interview on Twitter earlier in the day as “his first interview in the states since the election.”
“You’ve done us a favor,” Hannity gushed on-air. Thanks to Assange and WikiLeaks’s work, Hannity said, “we can now fix the problem” of our gaps in U.S. cybersecurity. (The DNC and Podesta emails were a wake-up call, in a sense.) Assange also “exposed the corruption in our government” for all to see.
“I have so many questions for you,” Hannity said, before reminding his audience of WikiLeaks’s “perfect” record: “You have not been proven wrong, not one single time,” he reiterated.
When asked if President […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
