News stories tagged with "healthcare"

(03/08/12) The Cuomo Administration is cracking down on insurance companies and health care providers who stick patients with unexpected out of network service bills. In Albany, Karen DeWitt reports. more

(02/28/12) After the long recession, most pundits expected the 2012 political campaign to revolve around economic issues.

But politicians on the right and left have instead been reviving some surprising social questions, ranging from contraception to prenatal testing to the role of religion in politics and public life.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, argued that opposition to insurance coverage for those services amounts to "an attack on women."

"Many of us are outraged, really outraged," Sen. Gillibrand told the magazine. "In the year 2012, we should not be debating access to birth control. No boss should be making a decision about what health care their employees should be eligible to take."

Polls show that the vast majority of American families use contraception and think contraception should be widely available. Surveys also suggest that a smaller majority of Americans think religious groups should provide full insurance benefits to employees.

But Bishop Terry Lavalley, who heads the Diocese of Ogdensburg, sees this very differently.

He argues that Federal changes to healthcare laws proposed by the Obama administration threaten the religious freedom of groups like the Roman Catholic Church.

Bishop LaValley met recently with Brian Mann to talk about the Church's prominent role in this year's political campaign and about the difficulties of teaching Catholic doctrine in an age when even many Roman Catholics are making very different moral choices. more

(01/25/12) Did you make a New Year's resolution to lose weight or get more exercise? Some local small businesses are doing their part to help their employees stay healthy at the workplace. Wellness programs are not new. They've been staples at large companies for years, but are less likely to be used at small businesses. That's changing.

Amid soaring health spending, there is growing interest in workplace disease prevention and wellness programs to improve health and lower costs. Eager to control rising health care costs, small firms in St. Lawrence County are turning to a health experts for help. Todd Moe has more.

(08/04/11) Dozens of swimmers will gather in Hannawa Falls for the annual "Swim a Mile for Hospice" event on Saturday. It's a non-competitive mile long swim to benefit the work hospice does in the St. Lawrence Valley. Last summer, 67 swimmers young and old took to the water at Postwood Park Beach. Todd Moe caught up with members of Team Cobb -- a father-daughter swim team -- just before a recent practice swim in the pool at St. Lawrence University. They swam last year and will be back in the water on Saturday.

(08/02/11) Essex County supervisors are wrestling once again with the future of the Horace Nye Nursing Home.

At a meeting yesterday in Elizabethtown, the supervisors tabled a move to try to privatize the county-run home, which currently has about a hundred residents.

As Brian Mann reports, Horace Nye is seen by many county leaders as a valuable program, one that helps some of the region's neediest and most vulnerable people.

But they say the state property tax cap approved this summer is making it harder and harder to pay for the nursing home's mounting losses. more

(05/05/11) The State Senate held a panel discussion with major health care stakeholders, on how New York will implement the federal health care reforms proposed by President Obama and passed by Congress. In Albany, Karen DeWitt filed this report: more

(04/25/11) Religious groups that oppose legalized abortion staged their annual protest rally in Plattsburgh on Friday.

They sang hymns, prayed and marched outside the clinic operated by Planned Parenthood. Martha Foley has details.

(04/25/11) Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures performed in America. Women in New York state choose to terminate roughly a third of all pregnancies.

But the debate over abortion has raged ever since the practice was legalized by the Supreme Court in 1973.

Kathie Wunderlich is president of Planned Parenthood of the North Country, which operates eight clinics across the region.

Last week as the Good Friday protests were getting underway, she spoke in-depth with Brian Mann.

We asked Wunderlich to respond to a claim by Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, who said that more than ninety percent of Planned Parenthood's medical services involve abortions.

(04/12/11) One of the biggest employers in the Adirondack Park is looking to expand. A public hearing will be held tonight in Saranac Lake on Adirondack Medical Center's plan to build a two-story, 9,000-square-foot medical office building to treat patients with chronic wounds.

The $2.7 million project is the latest in a series of building upgrades for AMC over the last 10 years. Chris Knight reports. more

(10/18/10) This morning we continue our on-going series called the Hospice Path. North Country Public Radio is looking in-depth at the way hospice and palliative care programs can help people at the end of their lives.

We've been profiling Bill Gallagher in Saranac Lake. He's 87 years old and his lungs are slowly failing. With the support of his wife Tomi, he's been able to remain at home with his family. Despite those successes, Bill has struggled at times with depression, loneliness and boredom.

As Brian Mann reports, hospice experts say those experiences are common for hospice patients nearing the end of their lives. more