A Toledo Blade investigation by Steve Eder and Julie M. McKinnon shows doctors nationwide fear that increasingly stringent insurance rules and frequent second-guessing of doctors’ orders are eroding the doctor-patient relationship — and harming patients. The Blade’s four-part, eight-month investigation included interviews with about 100 physicians in a dozen states and a national online survey of doctors with more than 900 responses. More than 99 percent of respondents reported that insurers had interfered with their treatment decisions.

More 13-year-olds — 10 since 2001 — were shot in hunting-related accidents than persons of any other age, a Tulsa World analysis found. That’s more than two times as many hunting accidents than any other age group since 2001. Three of the 10 accidents were fatal. Experts site inexperience and immaturity as likely reasons for these accidents.   A new Oklahoma state law “reduced the age minimum for hunters seeking an apprentice designation. The minimum dropped from 16 years old to 10 years old and allows children with the designation to hunt with a certified and licensed adult prior to taking a hunter education course themselves.”  Many believe direct supervision from a young age will improve overall safety for young hunters.

Clark Kauffman of The Des Moines Register reports that in the past five years, 38,000 Americans, including 267 Iowans, have complained of medical-privacy violations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. More than half of those complaints nationally have been disposed of with no investigation. Until last year, no one nationally ever was prosecuted for violating HIPAA. Kauffman used state unemployment records to provide readers with the names of specific hospitals and caregivers who snooped through the medical records of HIV-positive men, pregnant teenagers, victims of domestic violence and emergency-room patients.

An FBI raid at three Southern California hospitals uncovered “a massive scheme to defraud taxpayer-funded healthcare programs of millions of dollars by recruiting homeless patients for unnecessary medical services,” according to a report in The Los Angeles Times. The chief executive at one hospital faces criminal charges, while executives from two other facilities have been named in a civil suit filed by the City of Los Angeles. Additional charges are expected as the investigation continues.

“Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance,” reports Deborah Sontag of The New York Times. Hospitals are deporting these patients without any government assistance or oversight. While immigration rights advocates see this as international patient dumping, hospital administrators feels they’re being saddled with the problems of dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems.

Through a FOIA request, The Center for Public Integrity obtained the Environmental Protection Agency’s internal pesticide incident database, called one of the “Ten Most Wanted Government Documents” by a watchdog group. Their analysis of the more than 90,000 “adverse-reaction” reports filed by manufacturers to the EPA found that the supposedly “safe” pesticide compounds now in thousands of consumer products — pyrethrins and pyrethroids — lead the list of poisonings, and that the reports on these compounds have jumped 300 percent in the past decade.

Mary Zahn and Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailed the rising number of injuries and serious violations at nursing homes in the state of Wisconsin. The reporters reviewed more than 20,000 pages of documents and built their own database of accidents, injuries and deaths spanning the past 3 ½ years. They found that the increase in injuries is occurring during a time of dramatic worker turnover in the nursing home industry and that out-of-state corporations own a disproportionate rate of homes cited over and over for problems. The two-part series includes a searchable database of all homes that have received actual harm or immediate jeopardy citations from regulators since Jan. 1 2005.

An investigation by the Rocky Mountain News examined the federal program to compensate the people who became sick building the nation’s nuclear weapons. The paper found that the agencies running the program, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services, have derailed aid to workers by keeping reports secret from them, constantly changing rules and delaying cases until sick workers died. Workers — and their survivors — from every state in the nation are mired in program so adversarial that top program officials once considered putting some sick workers under government surveillance. At the same time, top officials have collected large bonuses.

Despite being under a court order for 15 years to improve how it collects and processes blood, the American Red Cross remains plagued by problems, reports Stephanie Strom of The New York Times. “The problems, described in more than a dozen publicly available F.D.A. reports — some of which cite hundreds of lapses — include shortcomings in screening donors for possible exposure to diseases; failures to spend enough time swabbing arms before inserting needles; failures to test for syphilis; and failures to discard deficient blood.” Since 2003, $21 million in fines have been levied against the the ARC for failure to follow procedures meant to keep the blood supply safe.

Marshall Allen and Alex Richards of the Las Vegas Sun investigated the prevalence of use and abuse of prescription narcotics in Nevada. The Sun’s analysis showed that “Nevadans consume about twice the national average of several prescription painkillers,” including hydrocodone, methadone and oxycodone. Data from the Clark County coroner’s office shows that deaths from prescription drug overdoses have now exceeded those linked to illicit drugs.