Georgia Health News: Hospitals Refuse To Hire Smokers Three Georgia hospital systems have gone one step beyond banning smoking on their campuses. They won't hire people who smoke. The three health systems ” Gwinnett Medical Center, DeKalb Medical Center, and Phoebe Putney Health System in Albany ” will drop job applicants from their candidate list if a blood test for nicotine comes up positive. ... About 20 percent of American adults are smokers. ... Smokers have higher health care costs and lower productivity, and many employers require workers who smoke to pay a surcharge on health insurance premiums (Miller, 2/15).

The Baltimore Sun: Johns Hopkins, University Of Baltimore Form Medical-Law Center The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Baltimore School of Law said Tuesday that they would forge an unusual formal collaboration aimed at fostering a stronger relationship between doctors and lawyers so they may better understand the evolving health care landscape. With a first-year budget of about $1 million, the schools will open a center in July that will be part academic institution focused on educating practitioners and students of medicine and law, and part think tank aimed at influencing health care policy (Cohn, 2/15). 

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.