Reporters Health

Community Psychiatric Centers, preparing to close or sell some of its psychiatric hospitals and cut as much as 10% of its work force, said Thursday that it posted a loss of $37.9 million for its latest fiscal quarter. The psychiatric hospital chain, which has 53 facilities worldwide, last month warned investors to expect the red ink, the bulk of which results from writing off the cost of severance packages and assets as part of the restructuring of an unspecified number of hospital facilities.

Cigarette smoking--of all addictive behaviors--is the one most likely to take hold during adolescence and almost all adult smokers took their first drag before they were graduated from high school, the surgeon general's annual report on smoking said Thursday. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders unveiled the report with a warning to the nation's young people: "Tobacco addicts and it kills."

Los Angeles County health officials confirmed two local cases of endemic typhus Friday and urged residents to trim bushes that are favorite foraging grounds for rodents linked to the disease. Health officials said two men in their 20s, living in Pasadena and South Pasadena, came down last month with the illness, whose symptoms include severe headaches, high fever, muscle aches and rash.

As the nation struggled last year with rising healthcare costs and a recession, the five largest health insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion -- up 56% over 2008, according to a new report by liberal healthcare activists. Based on company financial reports for 2009 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report said, insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.

American children frequently are more at risk on a wide variety of social, economic and health problems than their counterparts in other major industrialized countries, according to a congressional report made public Sunday. The study, conducted by the Census Bureau for the House Committee on Children, Youth and Families, said America "lags behind" its major competitors in the health and well-being of its children, even though it has the knowledge and ability to ensure them better lives.

In another sign of progress in the war on substance abuse, the number of drug-related visits to hospital emergency rooms across the country has fallen for the first time in the 1990s, federal health officials announced Tuesday. After rising steadily through 1994, drug-caused emergency treatment declined 6% from 1995 to 1996, according to the federal government's Drug Abuse Warning Network, a national reporting system.

The Department of Veterans Affairs cannot assure veterans that they are receiving the best health care possible from the more than 170 VA hospitals, warns the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees the VA. Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.) delivered his bleak assessment of the department's health care system to VA Secretary-designate Togo West Jr. in a Dec. 19 letter.

Many Los Angeles-area health care facilities are failing to properly inform patients about their rights to make out living wills, a consumer advocacy group says in a study scheduled for release today. The Welfare Advocacy Project, after visiting 26 hospitals and 21 nursing homes, concluded that more education and enforcement are needed to fully implement the Patient Self-Determination Act.

While a massive overhaul of the Ventura County Mental Health Department has dramatically increased treatment for most of the county's mentally ill, critics say the new system is still ignoring the most serious problem cases. Nearly three years into the four-year, $16-million overhaul, the department has already drastically reshaped itself in an effort to make Ventura County's public mental health system a model for counties throughout the state.