The boy's mother, Sarah Beck, said she didn't take her son to the ED because he wasn't vaccinated, in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Arizona, Illinois, and New York.
- Arizona: Police in Chandler, Arizona, last month raided the house of a woman who ignored orders from two hospitals to take her two-year-old son to the ED after he ran a fever above 105 degrees. The mother, Sarah Beck, said she didn't take her son to the ED because she feared being reported to the Arizona Department of Child Safety because her son wasn't vaccinated.The police on Thursday said they chose to "force entry" because the child needed immediate medical attention. After raiding the family's home, police took Beck's children to the hospital and placed them in foster care. Brooks Bryce, the boy's father, said the police "treated [them] like criminals" (Noori Farzan, Washington Post, 3/29).
- Illinois: Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services has sued the federal government over CMS' attempt to acquire $145 million in Medicaid repayments from two hospitals. CMS in 2016 asked for $140.3 million in repayments from the University of Illinois Hospital and $4.5 million in repayments from Mount Sinai Hospital, claiming that the state "did not follow the standards and methodologies in [its] Medicaid State plan" when it calculated the hospitals' DSH payments, according to HHS. Illinois in the lawsuit claimed the payments should have been calculated through a prospective method rather than a retrospective method (Haefner, Becker's Hospital Review, 3/28).
- New York: The state of New York on Thursday filed a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court against the Sackler family, who own and manage Purdue Pharma, claiming the family redirected millions of dollars from the company to offshore accounts. The lawsuit seeks to order the Sacklers to return the transferred funds. The lawsuit also alleges that pharmaceutical distributors Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisource Gergen helped pharmacies circumvent monthly opioid limits. A spokesperson for the Sackler family said the lawsuit is a "misguided attempt to place blame where it does not belong for a complex public health crisis," adding that the Sacklers "strongly deny these allegations." A spokesperson for Purdue Pharma said the company also denies the allegations (Rabin, New York Times, 3/28).
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