Enlarge / The Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (credit: Getty | Bobby Bank )

Nonprofit hospitals are under increasing scrutiny for skimping on charity care, relentlessly pursuing payments from low-income patients, and paying executives massive multi-million-dollar salaries—all while earning tax breaks totaling billions.

One such hospital system is RWJBarnabas Health, a large nonprofit chain in New Jersey, whose CEO made a whopping $17 million in 2021, while the hospital system only spent 1.65 percent of its nearly $6 billion in revenue on charity care.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is gearing up for a showdown next week with the CEO of RWJBarnabas Health, Mark Manigan. Nurses at one of the chain's locations, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, are on strike, saying that the facility has become a dangerous place to work due to inadequate staffing levels.

Enlarge / A premature baby in the neonatal intensive care unit at University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa on August 13, 2021. The baby was born two days earlier at 22 weeks and at birth weighed just 1 lb., 0.1 oz. (credit: Getty | Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post )

The Food and Drug Administration is warning health care providers not to use probiotics containing live bacteria or yeast in preterm infants after the agency began investigating the July death of a preterm, low-weight infant given such a product in an unnamed hospital.

The infant developed sepsis from the bacterium in the probiotic product—Evivo with MCT Oil made by Infinant Health—and subsequently died.

In a statement to Ars, the FDA said it quickly investigated the death after receiving an initial report on July 31. "Infant deaths are especially tragic and determining causality of preterm infant death can be particularly complicated," an agency spokesperson said. The agency reviewed medical records and laboratory tests from the case and collected clinical samples and product samples for analysis.

Enlarge / Surgical implements are seen on a tray during a surgery. (credit: Getty | Ritesh Shukla )

More than 70 staff members of a San Diego-area hospital are calling for a halt of all surgeries at the facility due to unidentified black, brown, and gray specks on surgical trays, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

The objecting staff have signed a petition to spur hospital officials to pause procedures until the issue is resolved. But officials at the facility, the Kaiser Permanente Zion Medical Center, have rejected the call, according to the Union-Tribune. A spokesperson for the facility did not respond to voicemails from Ars.

"Providing safe, quality, and timely care to our patients is our top priority, and we will continue to schedule surgeries at Zion that can be safely performed," Kaiser told the Union-Tribune in a statement. "We have confirmed that all measures we are taking to clean, process and transport surgical equipment to our Zion Medical Center for use [are] safe and medically appropriate."

Enlarge / A health care worker exits the emergency room at Hudson Regional Hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey, on December 11, 2020. (credit: Getty | KENA BETANCUR )

The New Jersey health department has fined a state hospital $63,000 after police discovered a stockpile of 39 firearms—including an illegal assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine—stashed in an unlocked hospital closet.

The firearm stockpile was found on the afternoon of July 18, when Secaucus police were called to the Hudson Regional Hospital over a bomb threat. The bomb threat was later determined to be a hoax, but while police conducted a safety sweep of the facility, bomb-sniffing dogs led officers to the weapons.

The stash included 11 handguns of various calibers, 27 rifles/shotguns, and a Kriss Vector .45 caliber semi-automatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine, which police determined to be an illegal assault rifle. Additionally, they found a 14-round high-capacity handgun magazine. (Images of the stockpile were caught on released body cam footage .)

Enlarge / Oral swaps and a Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit (rape kit). (credit: Getty | MediaNews Group )

Seeking emergency medical care in the US after a sexual assault can incur hefty hospital bills that may deter assault reporting and compound victims' trauma, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine .

On average, hospital emergency departments charged $3,551 for urgent medical care coded as caused by sexual violence. People who were sexually assaulted while pregnant faced even steeper bills, with an average of $4,553. Uninsured victims or those who chose to pay themselves were served bills that averaged $3,673. Even those with private insurance faced burdensome bills; the study found that insured victims paid an average of 14 percent of their bills out-of-pocket, which for the average bill would work out to nearly $500.

"Emergency department charges may discourage the reporting of rape and seeking of medical care for both short-term and long-term sequelae of sexual assault," the authors caution. "Incurring such charges may further harm survivors—even those with full insurance coverage—by serving to disclose a potentially stigmatizing event to parents, partners, or employers. Moreover, such bills may further traumatize survivors by suggesting that they are personally responsible for their assault."

Enlarge / Former president Donald Trump, right, listens to Deborah Birx, former coronavirus response coordinator, as she speaks during a news conference in the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

This December, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will finally regain control of national COVID-19 hospital data—which the agency abruptly lost early in the pandemic to an inexperienced private company with ties to then-President Donald Trump.

As SARS-CoV-2 raged in the summer of 2020, the Trump administration was busy sabotaging the once-premier public health agency . The administration's meddling included stripping the CDC of its power to collect critical data on COVID-19 patients and pandemic resources in hospitals around the country.

According to multiple investigative reports at the time, then-White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx was frustrated by the CDC's slow and somewhat messy process of collecting and tidying the data submitted by thousands of hospitals. The data included stats on admissions, patient demographics, bed availability, ventilator use, discharges, and personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies.