Bob CollinsThe category du jour is hospitals. We are not wanting for items in the news.
>> In Massachusetts, the UMass Medical Center has shut down its recruitment booths in New Hampshire which sought candidates for a bone marrow registry. The problem isn’t that the recruiters used models in short skirts and heels in malls — because nothing says “bone marrow” like a model in a short skirt and heels — but that the hospital charged big fees to insurance companies to conduct DNA tests to match potential donors. (Boston Globe)
>> In Arizona, the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix stripped a hospital of its Catholic affiliation Tuesday for performing an abortion last year that doctors said was needed to save the life of the mother. “How is that better for anybody [if] both the woman and the fetus die, and then you have four orphans and a widower left at home?” a professor of religion told the LA Times.
>> A study out today says one out of every five people admitted to a U.S. hospital in 2008 were born the year that Franklin D. Roosevelt was first inaugurated president (or earlier).
>> Santa Claus will visit a children’s hospital in Washington on Saturday. The director of the child life program at the hospital says in all his years, he’s never heard a kid ask Santa to make him/her better for Christmas.
