Bob CollinsFrance, bless their Franco hearts, has a new law that gives employees the right to ignore business emails after hours, but only if the company they work for has more than 50 employees. “But it is born of the enlightened view that it is actually beneficial for people not to work all the time, and Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Health
The Salvation Army has reversed a decades-old policy and will no longer bar people who’ve been drinking from its shelter in La Crosse, the La Crosse Tribune reports. Read more →
There are angels who walk among us and if you want to glimpse a few, look up sometime on the worst of nights when you hear a helicopter. Nobody would fly in such conditions unless there was someone who needed help.
They’re the crew of medical evacuation helicopters, and they include people like Miles Weske of Nisswa, who is going back to work on Sunday, an impressive fact considering that he was almost killed in September when bad weather forced the North Memorial Air Ambulance to the ground north of the Alexandria airport. Read more →
Malcolm McDonald, 81, died on Christmas Day, the Austin Daily Herald says. He wanted to die on his own terms, but Minnesota has other ideas on this sort of thing. Read more →
When it was revealed that Cindy Stowell had died, weeks after taping an appearance on Jeopardy, we had no idea how well she did on the show, a lifelong dream, apparently.
Now we do.
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When it comes to health care, Minnesota is the nation’s teacher.
The Boston Globe reports that a contingent from Massachusetts, a state that usually ranks fairly high in health care innovation, is finishing up two days of meetings with experts in Minnesota to figure out what this state knows that others don’t. Read more →
The family of Shane Paul Lohan, of Hanover, Mass., wasn’t reluctant to describe their son in the obituary his mother had to write for him last week.
He was a drug user; heroin, as near as we can tell. It killed him at he age of 24. Read more →
You’ll have to work hard to find any significant logic in the interviews Vox’s Sarah Kliff did with residents in Kentucky, who apparently voted for Donald Trump because they didn’t think he and the Republicans would really take away their health insurance coverage.
He was, you may recall, the candidate promising to repeal Obamacare. Read more →
The White House’s video touting the website where people can shop for health insurance is a little like John Belushi’s last attempt to rally his beaten frat brothers in Animal House.
But as a “bit”, it’s got legs. Read more →
If you want to understand the true horror of gun violence, talk to a pediatric surgeon like John Densmore, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.
Between November 2012 and August 2016 he’s treated 12 gunshot victims. Children. The hospital as a whole has treated 200. Children. Read more →
Cindy Stowell, a science content developer from Austin, Texas, died this week, months after she taped her appearance in August, promising to donate any winnings to cancer research.
Read more →
Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not the time of year when people are more likely to take their own lives.
The notion that it is — allegedly due to the holidays and the darkness of winter — is a myth, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania reports today. But that fact hasn’t stopped it from being repeated. Read more →
A group of 17-year-old students in Australia has illustrated the obscenity of the U.S. pharmaceutical market. The boys created the active ingredient in Daraprim, the anti-parasitic drug used by malaria and Aids patients, which a U.S. company is currently selling here for about $750 a pill. Read more →
At far too young of an age, students in Renville are learning a painful lesson about life: Sometimes, depression leads people to take their own life. Read more →
Trump is appointing Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., as the new secretary of health and human services, the perfect person, Vox says, to roll back health care coverage, an issue Democrats were too afraid to defend in the recent election.
Price is one of the few Republicans in Congress who actually has proposed health care legislation in the post-Obamacare world. Read more →