Medical Care

It was Easter weekend when people in Oaxaca noticed strange happenings at the state-run Dr. Aurelio Valdivieso General Hospital. Sections were suddenly off-limits. Security guards were added. The cop reporter at the local newspaper, El Diario Despertar, got a tip from a source at the hospital. Not above dressing its journalists up as paramedics, the paper sent two people to investigate. They quickly realized that the hospital was seized by alarm.

Irene Steinlage has trouble walking, getting dressed, making her bed, taking a bath. She has stayed in her Folsom home with the help of a health aide, one that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the state can no longer afford. The governor's plan to take away such care is meant to save money. But it could end up costing California more by forcing the 85-year-old, who has Parkinson's, osteoporosis and other ailments -- and thousands like her -- into nursing homes.

Officials at a clinic that treated Dae'von Bailey six weeks before he was found beaten to death said Friday that their staff had warned social workers he might be an abuse victim, contradicting an account by the Los Angeles County child welfare department about how it dealt with the abuse allegations.

reporting from san fernando, philippines Rey Torres dreamed of a better life for his wife and five children when he left a neighborhood of wooden shacks and burning trash piles to drive a bus on a U.S. military base near Baghdad. He hoped to send his children to college and build a new home with the $16,000 a year he earned in Iraq -- four times what he could make in the Philippines. Then, in April 2005, Torres, 31, was killed in an ambush by Iraqi insurgents. His widow and children were supposed to be protected by a war zone insurance system overseen by the U.S. government.

Federal regulators investigating serious failings in UC Irvine Medical Center's anesthesiology department threatened to cut off Medicare funding after identifying dozens of new problems within the hospital. In a 127-page report, regulators described repeated examples of poor oversight and inadequate systems to protect patients. In one case, a psychiatric patient urinated on a pile of bed linens because the audio equipment used to monitor seclusion rooms was not working, according to the report.

On his medical missions to Africa, Dr. Lawrence Czer has dealt with poverty, lack of electricity, bad accommodations -- and military checkpoints. In Sierra Leone, Czer and his team were sometimes stopped by rifle-toting soldiers who simply wouldn't let them through. "They'll just have you stand there and you'll see other people going through," Czer said. The medical team refused to give the soldiers any money. All they could do was try to cajole them. "Or shame them," the doctor said.

Eleven California hospitals were fined $25,000 each in administrative penalties Thursday for violations that, in some cases, led to death or serious injury, according to Department of Public Health officials. Most of the hospitals fined were in Southern California, and about half were cited because doctors or hospital staff had left foreign objects in patients after surgery. Coast Plaza Doctors Hospital in Norwalk and Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center were fined for failing to follow proper surgical procedures.

Timothy Brodt is among more than 2,000 bike riders who left Sunday on a 545-mile trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles as part of the AIDS/LifeCycle benefit. He carried with him a small black-and-white photo of his Uncle Richard, who died of AIDS more than 20 years ago. For the last two years, Brodt has participated in the annual bike ride to raise money for HIV and AIDS-related services at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Los Angeles County supervisors have asked state officials to compel California nursing homes to prominently post their new federal star ratings, much in the way restaurants display letter grades. But the proposal faces opposition from patient advocates and nursing home officials who fault the five-star ratings system that went into effect last month, saying it overlooks significant violations and sometimes penalizes well-run nursing homes.

For California, the question of how much medical aid states will get under the economic stimulus plan is a billion-dollar one. And it has revived a debate over whether the Golden State receives its fair share of federal dollars. The House version of the bill that was approved this week would give financially strapped California about $11.1 billion in Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for the poor, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.