As Americans in Puerto Rico continue to go without power, the effects of Hurricane Maria damage are now being seen in hospitals around the nation. The island is a major source of the sterile saline IV bags used nationwide; the plants that produce those bags were damaged in the hurricane and even now must contend with the island’s still-”intermittent” power grid. That has resulted in a severe shortage of the supplies in U.S. hospitals; that shortage is affecting patient care, and may affect it further as the flu season ramps up.
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has nurses spending as long as 35 minutes delivering medications using IV syringes, known as an IV push. Instead of a four-to-five day supply of bags, the hospital now has one or two days’ worth. The hospital is so concerned it is looking at using glass bottles for patients instead of the IV bags.
“If the influenza virus or catastrophic event breaks out, that would stress us more. In some ways, it’s unprecedented,” said O’Neil Britton, Mass General’s chief medical officer. “It raises fear we may have to make choices about not doing some things and delaying elective procedures.”
Officials at Catholic Health Initiatives, which offers care in 100 hospitals across 17 states, said it is possible they would have to delay elective procedures until the shortage abates.
“It’s hard to overstate the public-health crisis,” said Craig Frost, vice president of clinical pharmacy services at Catholic Health Initiatives. “It’s a fundamental part of patient care.”
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2010—Economic Outrage du Jour: Emails Exposed:
Hugh Son at Bloomberg reports that e-mails forced into the light show that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, parts of whose job is supposedly to be curtailing bankers' riskiest impulses, told American International Group to conceal information about its payments to banks while the financial crisis was unfolding:
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. …
"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information," said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers "deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
You won't hear any applause in this corner for the obstructionist, ultra-wealthy Darrell Issa. His self-funded recall petition encumbered us Californians with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governorship, a position Issa himself hoped to capture. His support for English-Only laws, right-wing attacks on ACORN, dissing of the 9/11 widows and other antics since his self-funded campaign put him in Congress epitomize the politics progressives are duty-bound to grind into dust.
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