In November 2018, a jury in Oklahoma City, OK awarded the family of Oranna Cunningham nearly $25.6 million for a bad faith insurance lawsuit after she lost her battle with cancer.

Cunningham has been diagnosed with advanced nasopharyngeal cancer. Her physician recommended proton beam therapy; however, her insurer, Aetna, refused to cover the cost of the therapy because they deemed it to be experimental.

Proton beam therapy is recognized by the FDA and is often approved for pediatric and Medicare patients. The treatment allows doctors to focus cancer-fighting proton energy on the cancerous cells. Because it’s targeted, it preserves organ health and may reduce other harmful side effects.

On December 19, 2018, an Illinois appellate court revived a lawsuit regarding two individuals who were struck by a speeding vehicle after an Uber driver kicked them out of their ride.

In October 2014, Farid Kessanti, the Uber driver, picked up Sean Kramer and Jasmine Vega from the Chicago theater. After taking several wrong turns, the passengers began to question Kessanti’s driving abilities and area competency. As a result, Kessanti terminated the service mid-ride and kicked the two out of his vehicle.

The two were left in a high-traffic and allegedly high-crime area. It was poorly lit and surrounded by bars and people with varying levels of sobriety. While walking to their destination, they were struck in an intersection by a speeding driver, John Szczepaniak – who fled the scene and was apprehended the next day. Both Kramer and Vega were injured in the accident.

All acute-care hospital in Louisville, Kentucky and those in Floyd and Clark counties in Indiana will see reduced Medicare payments during the federal fiscal 2019.

The reductions are happening because the hospitals did not meet the performance standards established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program (VBP).

The VBP Program was implemented in 2012. It is designed to make the quality of care better for hospital patients and make hospital stays a better experience for patients. This program reduces all Medicare payments to participating hospitals by two percent and that money then gets redistributed to hospitals depending on their performance in a number of areas:

• Mortality and complications
• Healthcare-associated infections
• Patient safety
• Patient experience
• Process
• Efficiency and cost reduction

A new Medicare payment program, Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing Program (SNF VBP), has penalized three-fourths of nursing home facilities in Kentucky. This program is part of an effort by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to reimburse medical providers based on the value or outcomes of the care they provide to patients.

The new program, which was created in 2014 by Congress, will impact payments made in federal fiscal 2019. It aims to encourage facilities to reduce hospital readmission rates by assigning facilities increases or reductions in Medicare payment based on the changes in how often skilled-nursing facility patients were readmitted to a hospital within 30 days after being discharged to a nursing home facility.

The U.S. Department of Education proposed changes to Title IX in November 2018. These changes are supposed to give accommodations to students who are sexual assault survivors, limit what the schools need to look into, and give students who were accused resources to defend themselves, too.

The changes are:

• Sexual assaults that happen off-campus don’t need to be investigated by the university.
• Schools need to provide students who were sexually assaulted with support, such as switching schedules, counseling, and keeping their attacker from contacting them. This should still happen even if the student doesn’t want to make a formal complaint.
• Should a student tell a professor that they were assaulted, this doesn’t mean that the university needs to follow up with the allegation.
• When a school is investigating a sexual assault case, there will be a hearing where the student’s representatives can provide a cross-examination, but cannot ask questions about the sexual history of the student who is saying they were assaulted.
• The parties involved have equal access to the evidence.
• While schools can deny appeals for students facing disciplinary decisions in sexual misconduct cases, if they do allow appeals, then the parties involved can do so.
• The university official who is investigating the allegation can’t decide the case’s outcome.