“There was a couple of weeks when I was at work where the only time we had an ICU bed open up was when a patient would pass,” Dr. Teresa Bau said. “And then, it was instantly snatched up. That was a really grim week for me.”
The request — for five intensive care unit (ICU) beds and five general medical-surgical beds — was made Wednesday to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and announced Thursday by the governor at a press conference.
“We cannot possibly continue at the current rates of exponential growth in the community,” the doctor said. “It’s not sustainable. I believe we’re looking at 10 days of wiggle room before there is nowhere to go and we’re looking at those sorts of crazy scenarios where there’s patients lined up in the hallway.”
Baxter Regional Medical Center has not yet had a confirmed case of COVID-19, but the Mountain Home hospital is nevertheless feeling the impacts of the pandemic.
As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, the Arkansas Department of Human Services is relaxing certain policies that have led to the removal of tens of thousands of Arkansans from the state’s Medicaid rolls in recent years. Around 11,000 beneficiaries whose coverage was terminated at the end of last month have now been reinstated. Many more will be reinstated as the state works to implement guidance from the federal government.
Arkansas funeral home staff and coroners' offices prepare for a rising death count.
As the coronavirus has spread across the United States and Arkansas has seen an increase in cases, I’ve been thinking of the rural people I grew up with in Johnson County and how they are dealing with COVID-19.
Some 908,900 Arkansans may become infected with the novel coronavirus over the course of the next six months, according to an epidemiological model of the spread of COVID-19 in Arkansas provided by the Arkansas Hospital Association to its members today. Among those who become infected, an estimated 190,800 Arkansans may need hospital care and 41,400 may need to be hospitalized in intensive care units in the next six months, according to the projections.
A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirement led to lower insurance rates among 30- to 49-year-olds in 2018, the group targeted by the first-of-its-kind work rule last year. The researchers also concluded that the policy did not lead to a rise in employment among this target population.
The Arkansas House of Representatives narrowly approved a bill to fund the state's Medicaid program on Tuesday, completing legislative action on the appropriation and handing a victory to Governor Hutchinson.
Two days after a federal judge halted Arkansas's first-in-the-nation work requirement for certain Medicaid beneficiaries, the state House of Representatives rejected the entire Medicaid budget by a large margin on Friday.
Governor Hutchinson said Thursday he has urged Trump administration officials to appeal a federal judge's order blocking Arkansas's first-in-the-nation Medicaid work requirement.
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