`It looks good,' Bush says about Mass. health reform
Despite swirling controversies over the Iraqi war, secret telephone surveillance, and immigration, President George Bush seems to have had time to stay on top of Massachusetts politics -- and he had encouraging news for the president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, Ronald Hollander, earlier this month.
Massachusetts officials are waiting to hear whether the administration will approve millions of dollars to help the state implement its new health insurance law, which will require all residents to have health insurance by July 1, 2007.
In early May, Hollander attended the American Hospital Association's annual meeting in Washington and Bush addressed the group, focusing on malpractice reform and health savings accounts. As Bush left, he moved among the crowd, shaking hands. When he got to Hollander, the Massachusetts healthcare leader brought up the state's new law. ``To my delight, he knew about it,"Hollander said. ``And he liked what he heard, especially the private insurance market part."
Bush said that Mike Leavitt, his health and human services secretary, would make the final decision. ``But it looks good," the president told Hollander. You can be sure those words have been making the rounds in Massachusetts healthcare circles.
New cancer unit to open at Faulkner Hospital
The Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center will open a $5 million cancer unit next month at Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain to help relieve overcrowding for patients who need exams and infusions of chemotherapy drugs. So far, five doctors who specialize in breast, gastrointestinal, and lung cancers -- Dr. Leroy Parker, Dr. Rochelle Scheib, Dr. Pankaj Bhargava, Dr. Michael Rabin, and Dr. Paul Marcoux -- have agreed to move their practices from Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's to the Faulkner.
Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's, which collaborate on cancer care, are searching for more space as they cope with a significant rise in the number of patients. Visits to doctors are growing 8 percent annually, while chemotherapy visits are growing 14 percent annually amid evidence that patients benefit from more-frequent infusions of medications. Even though Dana-Farber and the Brigham have opened infusion rooms at their Longwood Medical Area facilities on nights and weekends, they still don't have enough room and are also are discussing suburban expansions at Milford Regional Hospital and South Shore Hospital in Weymouth.
In Brief
Brigham and Women's has lost a second interventional cardiologist to the for-profit world. Dr. Campbell Rogers, the director of the cardiac catheterization lab at the Brigham, is leaving in July to become the chief technology officer for work at Cordis Corp. in Florida, the
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