Reporting

<p>California's long-running campaign to reduce air pollution has indirectly helped create a new problem: its oil refineries now produce more greenhouse gas emissions than refineries anywhere else in the country.</p>

<p>Kern County, with similar geography and population to Fresno, decided to enter the new health insurance program called Bridge to Reform. On the way, Kern has stumbled upon many challenges, but for some patients, the program has changed their lives.</p>

<p>Each year thousands of patients are harmed by medical care in Oregon. A Bend woman, Mary Parker, was one.</p>

<p>It is three in the morning and Philip, 27, wakes up from a nightmare that he soon forgets. Vivid dreams and dizziness are recurring experiences, side effects he attributes to taking Atripla, a pill he consumes daily because he has AIDS.</p>

<p>A confluence of factors including an inflexible regulatory enviroment that discourages research and discovery, a paltry research pipeline for drugs for the most serious illnesses, and a tendency for physicians to unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics for routine aches and pains is largely responsible for the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans, speakers at a major conference on infectious diseases this week announced.</p>

<p>Avoidable complications in hospitals kill more patients each year than AIDS, motor vehicle accidents and homicides combined. Why experts say hospitals are not as safe as they should be.</p>

<p>Five prominent Oregon hospitals do worse than the national average on a key measure of patient safety.</p>

Oregon, typically a progressive state, releases much less data about the quality and safety of its hospitals in at least one important database.

<p>While many states make information related to medical care complications public, Oregon does not. That means that the best information about an individual hospital’s quality and safety may be kept from the public.</p>