The Associated Press broke the story last week that software glitches in Department of Veterans Affairs computers caused incorrect doses of medicine to be administered to patients at V.A. hospitals across the country. In San Diego, the report said, computer screens failed to show doctors’ stop orders for drugs such as the blood thinner heparin. The troubles began after an August software upgrade and wasn’t fully fixed until last month, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The V.A. insisted that no patients had been harmed, but critics such as Dr. Jeffrey Linder of Harvard Medical School said the problem “was very serious, potentially.” … Bad news from a UCSD professor for those hoping the U.S. economy will turn around anytime soon. Takeo Hoshi, an international economic relations specialist, told a meeting of the American Economic Association in San Francisco last week that plans to bail out GM and Chrysler were similar to Japan’s 1990s government subsidies that sustained inefficient “zombie firms,” blocking the emergence of better-run companies.
The Associated Press broke the story last week that software glitches in Department of Veterans Affairs computers caused incorrect doses of medicine to be administered to patients at V.A. hospitals across the country. In San Diego, the report said, computer screens failed to show doctors’ stop orders for drugs such as the blood thinner heparin. The troubles began after an August software upgrade and wasn’t fully fixed until last month, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The V.A. insisted that no patients had been harmed, but critics such as Dr. Jeffrey Linder of Harvard Medical School said the problem “was very serious, potentially.” … Bad news from a UCSD professor for those hoping the U.S. economy will turn around anytime soon. Takeo Hoshi, an international economic relations specialist, told a meeting of the American Economic Association in San Francisco last week that plans to bail out GM and Chrysler were similar to Japan’s 1990s government subsidies that sustained inefficient “zombie firms,” blocking the emergence of better-run companies.
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