A hope to reduce medical errors

By: Erin Floro

Medicare will stop paying for medical errors this Wednesday. Even if it is the doctors fault, you will be billed. Medicare is the largest insurer in the country and their decision has made other insurers follow the same guideline.

These insurers will not pay for as many as 28 "never events." They are called that because they are never supposed to happen. If a patient gets an infection after surgery, or gets bed sores, or needs a second operation because the first one wasn't done properly, Medicare will not pay for the treatment.

This affects alot of people, there are over 12.5 million people annually that are covered by Medicare.

Medicare is reducing payments to hospitals with high readmission rates and they grant bonuses to doctors that report quality measures. Nurses have been trained and are more careful with medications and to prevent falls from happening.

Hospitals strongly enforced washing hands, that even cut as many people from getting sick again. Some changes have been technological, like an electric prescribing machine which reduced medication mistakes.Hospitals are complying with the rule to report medical errors. Doctors and nurses are focusing on avoiding accidents. By Medicare doing this, they want to encourage hospitals to eventually have zero medical errors.

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A hope to reduce medical errors

By: Erin Floro

Medicare will stop paying for medical errors this Wednesday. Even if it is the doctors fault, you will be billed. Medicare is the largest insurer in the country and their decision has made other insurers follow the same guideline.

These insurers will not pay for as many as 28 "never events." They are called that because they are never supposed to happen. If a patient gets an infection after surgery, or gets bed sores, or needs a second operation because the first one wasn't done properly, Medicare will not pay for the treatment.

This affects alot of people, there are over 12.5 million people annually that are covered by Medicare.

Medicare is reducing payments to hospitals with high readmission rates and they grant bonuses to doctors that report quality measures. Nurses have been trained and are more careful with medications and to prevent falls from happening. Hospitals strongly enforced washing hands, that even cut as many people from getting sick again. Some changes have been technological, like an electric prescribing machine which reduced medication mistakes.

Hospitals are complying with the rule to report medical errors. Doctors and nurses are focusing on avoiding accidents. By Medicare doing this, they want to encourage hospitals to eventually have zero medical errors.

Read more...

Credibility of journalists

By: Jessica Hamell

I couldn’t find something that interested me more then what I wrote on in my last blog. Journalists and reporters are already criticized for not being reliable. It doesn’t help that there are countless web sites that run fake news stories that are just to catch people attentions, but so many people can let them go as just rumors or fiction.

I found a poll at GeoCities.com which was talking about reporters that stated "44% said they are 'often inaccurate.' "

People often believe what they read or see until someone proves to them that it is wrong.

I found an article telling about how television news station had been fooled by a video they found on YouTube. They aired it on an expose talking about tendencies at a local high school.

The video even looked fake enough that there were comments posted on it saying it was fake but the television station disregarded those comments and still aired it.


Reporters as well as readers should do a little more investigating if they don’t think the news is credible. If people would just put a little more time into getting the news maybe the credibility of journalists would go up.

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Something left out

On Friday, September 26, Brandon Routh, the actor who played Superman in the new Superman movie, attended Simpson College. He was here supporting Obama. I was a lucky student who got to hear his speech.

Something that I noticed while in attendance to Routh speech was all the photographers that were there. There were three or four photographers that were taking photos of Brandon Routh. As I was deciding what to write for this blog I came across one of those photos on Google News.

The photo was of Routh giving his speech in Simpson College's Brenton Student Center. However, the article underneath the photo had nothing to do with Routh's visit to Simpson.

The article focused on the early voting process. The article doesn't even mention Simpson College or really any purpose for having the photo of Brandon Routh. So why did they put the photo with this article?

I know that, at Brandon Routh's speech, he did talk about the early voting process and talked about how students should take advantage of it. The article mentions this idea but not that it was being discussed with college students. It doesn't even mention Brandon Routh.

When writing an article how does the publisher decide what photos, if any will go with it. It just made me question how the process works.

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Stock Market Crisis explained

by, Sarah Keller

In class we have briefly discussed how some newspapers are making it fairly easy to follow the Wall Street crises happening in America, particularly the New York Times. Newspapers are becoming more reader friendly on how to follow everything that is going on with the stock market issues, for those of us who other wise would be dazed and confused.

Newspapers such as the New York Times are doing a good job with explaining how the crisis will pertain to you and how you may be affected by what is going on and what to do about it. One such article was by Tara Sigel Bernard, a recent college graduate who is worried about paying off her student loans.

USA TODAY jumped on board to help readers understand the importance of what is going on in the world today as well, by giving daily reports and keeping us updated on the latest news. USA even wrote an opinion column about the $700 bailout, making it easier for readers to see where other people stand on the issue and to gain more insight on the issues at hand.

If readers still do not understand what is happening they can simply look at comic strips such as Brian Duffy’s from The Des Moines register to see his thoughts on the crisis at hand very plainly stated through illustration.

I would just like to congratulate and thank most top notch newspapers for keeping America updated on the crisis that our country is falling into and for making it understandable for me, a naive college student who in the past saw no use in following the stock markets, to grasp what is happening to our country.

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Just beat it

By: Gabe Gilson

Before this summer, I had no clue whatsoever what a beat writer was. After watching countless hours of ESPN, surprisingly, you seem to learn a thing or two about real life as well as sports.

Beat writers do not only talk sports from day to day but also news, traffic, government and other things as well according to the Harrower text. Writers assigned to the sports beat often cover a single team. This would make for a fun season.

The Chicago Tribune has a particular writer that every day writes about the Cubs. This is his or her job. Steve Rhodes who today writes for his own online publication, The Beachwood Reporter, used to have this dream job. Every day, Rhodes would go to the game, talk to the players, and write what he saw.

How cool would this be? Every day you are going to the ballpark, watching the game, talking to the stars of the team and writing 500 words on a pitcher with a bum elbow, or about the 14 inning marathon game. On top of all this, you get paid! What a deal.

It is not like I am about to jump ship now and become a beat writer. It is more this being a great option for a career that was unfamiliar to me before a few months ago. The only thing is, as a fan of the team one would be covering, staying objective would be difficult.

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Keep on inspiring

By: Kayla Miller

Today, I was reading the Des Moines Register online, and a very inspiring story caught my eye.

An Indianola man has been working with his third-degree burns since he was 18 years old. He also lost the love of his life in his early 40s and lost movement in his left side from a stroke. But even so, he is known as a very optimistic man. Journalist Daniel Finney described him as a "kind of guy who could have an empty, cracked glass in the middle of a desert and believe beyond all doubt that his cup will soon runneth over." Just to know this, makes me want to read to the end. Readers are saying, "Feed me more news."

This man's life is inspirational to readers. The thing is, the article was sixty paragraphs long, and I read it to the very end because I wanted to, not because I had to. I very rarely read lengthy news stories. But this one was inspiring to me, it changed the way I felt when I read article.

Journalists know this. They put it in a way that we will love. They know that personal life stories bring in the readers, and especially since it is so close to the home, like this Indianola man. He made news happen, and was glad to share it in a positive way. And the journalists wrote it that way...

"Half-full. Always, half-full."

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