An acute-care hospital in Arizona was found to be giving a patient there the wrong kind of insulin AND the wrong dose. This caused her to have hypoglycemia and go into respiratory failure.
A Mayo Clinic research study reported that people with hypoglycemia had a doubled risk of mortality than those without the problem, even when the low blood sugars were deemed only as "mild" or "moderate" cases.
Arizona is cutting medical expenses for its poor and needy families by getting rid of "optional" medical devices such as prosthetics, insulin pumps, and transplants. And for those who wanted to tax soda and candy to pay for these "options," you can forget it. Read more about the ACCHS cuts here.
I've been reading Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. One thing that has stayed with me is about the extreme lack of food that caused so many people to die there during the 90s. She was talking about all the outside aid organizations that had started pulling out of North Korea because they weren't allowed to help or even see the neediest people, and how by 1998, the worst of the famine was over. However, the worst had passed not because anything had gotten any better, but because, in the words of a North Korean woman who lived through these desperate times, "Everybody who was going to die was already dead." (p. 146) The famine had effectively eliminated the neediest.
