Month: November 2013

By Karen Brooks and Lisa Maria Garza AUSTIN/DALLAS, Texas (Reuters) – Women seeking to terminate their pregnancies were turned away at clinics across Texas on Friday, providers said, after strict new regulations for physicians who perform abortions prompted a dozen facilities to stop offering them. "They're calling from all over – Fort Worth, West Texas, all over Dallas, Oklahoma, everywhere," said Betty Pettigrew, director at Routh Street Women's Clinic in downtown Dallas, which has offered abortion services since 1978. Offices were inundated with calls after a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a provision of a new Texas law that requires all doctors performing abortions to have an agreement with a local hospital to admit patients could go into immediate effect. The provision was part of a sweeping anti-abortion law, passed in July by the Republican-led Texas Legislature, that also requires abortion clinics to meet heightened building standards, bans abortion after 20 weeks and requires strict adherence to federal guidelines in prescribing the so-called abortion pill.

The troubled start of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law known as Obamacare has administration officials scrambling to address a host of problems, from the unreliability of the website HealthCare.gov to questions about who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their current coverage. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA Obama has been on the defensive about his healthcare policy since October 1, when HealthCare.gov was switched on and crashed the same night, preventing people from going online to create accounts and enroll in health insurance. Obama said on October 30 that "bad apple" insurance companies, not his healthcare law, are to blame for hundreds of thousands of people losing their coverage in the past few weeks. Obama has stood firm against Republican attempts to defund or delay the healthcare law – efforts that led to a 16-day government shutdown in early October.

China plans to end its controversial practice of using the organs of executed prisoners for transplants by around the middle of next year, a senior official told Reuters on Saturday. China is the only country that still systematically takes organs from executed prisoners for use in transplant operations, a decades-long practice that has drawn widespread international criticism. Beijing said in August it would begin to phase out the practice this month, and health officials have previously said China must stop using dead inmates' organs to "build a positive image that benefits the country." By mid-2014, all hospitals licensed for organ transplants will be required to stop using organs from executed prisoners and only use those voluntarily donated and allocated through a fledging national system, said Huang Jiefu, former deputy health minister who heads the organ transplant reform.

By C. E. Huggins NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – African American patients may feel less comfortable than white patients asking doctors if they can take cheaper drugs, a recent survey from an emergency department shows. White patients in the study were also more likely to be aware of low-cost prescription drug programs, according to lead author Dr. Preeti Dalawari, of Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and her colleagues. They said the study supports recommendations that doctors talk with patients about how much drugs cost and ways to overcome high price tags. Such discussions may help people stick more closely to their prescribed medications.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said on Friday that he is concerned about a shooting at the Los Angeles International Airport on Friday that killed one person and wounded at least six other people. “We’re concerned about it, but I’ll let law enforcement folks talk about it directly,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. (Reporting by Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton; editing by Jackie Frank)

(Reuters) – A U.S. Transportation Security Administration employee was shot and killed and another was injured in a shooting at the Los Angeles International Airport, a TSA spokesperson said on Twitter. “TSA confirms one male employee shot and killed, one injured,” the spokesperson said on the social media site, adding that the gunman in the incident was not a TSA employee.