As Houston braces for Hurricane Ike’s arrival, Continental Airlines has canceled flights from Wichita to Houston after 8 a.m. Friday until Sunday morning. At the same time, Wichita is expecting rain and potential flooding from Ike.
If you’re a Continental ticket holder needing to rebook a flight, be sure to call the airline’s reservations line at (800) 523-3273. You also can go to the counter at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport.
Hurricanes and floods? What’s next, locusts?
My drive home takes me by the “construction” site for the $60 mil. Parkstone at College Hill condo project near Douglas and Hillside. I use the term “construction” very loosely because after the groundbreaking, work started slowly and then just petered out. For the last three or four months, only a rusting Key Construction trailer marked it as a construction site. We made a few “what’s wrong?” phone calls.
The good news is that work has re-started on the project this week. Developer Mike Loveland says there was never anything wrong. He lost his financing in the spring and he had to get new financing — nearly $5 million from Legacy Bank — for the first phase. The delay was mostly a matter of filling out more paperwork, getting the appraisal, etc. Nice to see our skepticism refuted.
Now if he could just lend a hand on WaterWalk.
This won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve followed my coverage regarding a looming primary care physician shortage, but a new report published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association says only 2 percent of graduating medical students say they plan to work in primary care internal medicine.
This is a 7 percent decline from 1990, when 9 percent of graduating students said they planned to go into primary care.
Walk-in, retail health clinics are savings consumers a lot of money over doctor’s office visits, a new study found.
The study looked at MinuteClinics — associated with CVS drugstores — vs. family doctors and the emergency department for the treatment of common ailments, such as sore throats and ear infections.
Reports the Pioneer Press on the study published in the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs:
The total cost of a patient treated at a MinuteClinic for one of five basic illnesses was $51 cheaper on average than a patient treated at urgent care and $55 cheaper than a patient treated by a primary-care doctor. Pharmacy costs were also slightly lower for the patients using MinuteClinics.
The study authors note that 10 clinical problems such as sinusitis and immunizations make up more than 90 percent of retail clinic visits. These same 10 clinical problems make up 13 percent of adult primary care visits, 30 percent of pediatric primary care visits, and 12 percent of emergency department visits.
But then the authors talk about the main issue that really concerns the medical establishment:
Whether there will be a future shift of care from emergency departments or primary care doctors to retail clinics is unknown.
Looks like wholesale gas traders are fighting back against oil’s steady decline, according to the Associated Press.
Someone tell me again that the government’s got no business interfering in the energy “free markets.”
Supply and demand. Supply and demand. Squawk. Squawk.