New Orleans

The ordeal is over for two New Orleans nurses who were arrested last summer on second-degree murder charges after Hurricane Katrina. The nurses, Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, had been accused of killing four patients at Tenet's Memorial Medical Center with a "cocktail" of lethal drugs. But the district attorney has now dropped the case, largely because the two testified in a grand …

While the state of Louisiana would like to put a 484-bed teaching and research hospital in downtown New Orleans, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development isn't sure it's a good idea. HUD has agreed to release $74 million to buy land and prepare a design for the next Charity Hospital, which sat in downtown New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. But HUD isn't thrilled about the idea of giving the state an additional $150 million or so to build the hospital. In a …

> A Lakeland, FL dermatologist has been sentenced to six years in prison--and slapped with more than $1.2 million in fines--for committing Medicare fraud. Article

> Colorado's governor has signed a bill adding a number of mental health conditions to the the list of diseases the state's health plans must cover. …

Few hospitals have been through the kind of trauma faced by New Orleans facilities during Hurricane Katrina. No one at the city's Charity Hospital, in particular, can forget being trapped there with sick and dying patients as the city struggled to recover from flooding. But as hospitals must, given their 24-hour-a-day mission, the city's facilities are preparing to try again if faced with another emergency. Among other steps, they're digging wells, stockpiling supplies and buying …

Hoping to rebuild services that were cut or reduced after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana State University officials have asked state legislators for more than $200 million above and beyond the existing state budget. Services went away, in part, because Katrina-related flooding closed New Orleans-based Charity Hospital, which provided a wide range of services to poor and uninsured. More than half of the money, about $122 million, would be used to rebuild the still-devastated New Orleans-area …

As if state healthcare administrators weren't facing enough problems already, they're now battling a lawsuit over free care provided after Hurricane Katrina. Doctors at a New Orleans-area hospital, West Jefferson Medical Center, have sued the state for $100 million. The 381 physicians bringing the suit argue that state officials should reimburse them for treating indigent patients, which they've done since August 2005 in the wake of the hurricane. The physicians estimate that 30 percent …

Hospitals in New Orleans are searching far and wide to fill major gaps in their nursing lineups, still struggling with shortages arising from mass departures after Hurricane Katrina. For example, Ochsner Medical Center-West Bank and West Jefferson Medical Center have been forced to fill the 100 vacancies at each hospital with contract workers from out of state. The two also share …

Louisiana legislators continued to debate fundamental issues of health system reform this week, as different factions with different philosophies on public health struggle to assert themselves. To date, Louisiana's legislators haven't been able to agree on the critical issue of how many uninsured patients the state, much less how to pay for their care. This has prevented legislators from having a productive discussion on how to overhaul the state's healthcare system, and whether to fund a …

A new report by the state's non-profit Public Affairs Research Council (PAR) argues that Louisiana should shut down its rural charity hospitals and pay private hospitals to pick up the slack. PAR researchers are in favor of keeping teaching hospitals in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport open, but suggest that the seven other non-teaching hospitals in the system should be sold or transferred to local authorities. PAR's suggestions dovetail with recommendations some other researchers …

It's been 18 months since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, but 11 hospitals remain closed in the wake of the storm. Officials continue to argue over how the healthcare system should be reshaped, most notably over whether indigent care dollars should remain the Charity Hospital system or follow patients as part of an insurance scheme. Meanwhile, many of the city's …