Health

Bartlett Regional Hospital has a new CEO.

Christine Harff will join Juneau’s city-owned medical facility in mid-August. She comes from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, where she’s currently CEO of Sanford Medical Center.

Kristen Bomengen led the Bartlett board of directors’ CEO search committee. She says Harff meets the board’s top two qualifications — previous experience as both a CEO and in a clinical setting.

“We were hoping to get in someone who was experienced at balancing the many different factors that a CEO will have to balance,” Bomengen says. “And someone who could speak the language so to speak about the clinical experience. We were able to find both of those in this particular candidate.”

Before going to work for Sanford Health, Harff was Chief Operations Officer and Quality Resource Director at Monticello-Big Lake Community Hospital in Monticello, Minnesota. Early in her career she worked as a trauma nurse at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center.

Harff has a nursing degree and an MBA, both from the University of Minnesota. She also holds a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She was one of three finalists for the Bartlett CEO job. The other two candidates took their names out of consideration before the hiring process was complete.

The Bartlett board decided late last year to hire its own CEO after more than two decades of an outside management company running the hospital.

The Supreme Court has upheld the heart of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul — ruling in favor of the requirement that most Americans can be required to have health insurance, or else pay a penalty.

The decision means the historic overhaul will continue to take effect over the next several years, affecting the way countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care.

The ruling also hands President Barack Obama a campaign-season victory.

The court found problems with the law’s expansion of Medicaid. But even there, it said the expansion could proceed as long as the federal government does not threaten to withhold the entire Medicaid allotment to states if they don’t take part in the extension.

The court’s four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined Chief Justice John Roberts in the outcome.

The Supreme Court began hearing the case on March 26, nearly two years to the day that President Obama signed the act.

The Court had four key issues to consider:

• Does the Supreme Court have the right to hear the case?
• Does Congress have the authority to compel people to buy health insurance?
• If the court strikes down one part of the law (specifically the individual mandate) does the whole law become invalid? If not, would other linked parts of the law have to be struck down as well?
• Arguments by the states against being required to expand Medicaid programs.

On the SCOTUS blog the court wrote “Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.”

From the SCOTUS Blog:

“In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters.

“Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.”

Alaska, which is among the states that sued over the constitutionality of the federal health care law, has yet to implement a health care exchange. The health department has hired a consultant to help design one, and that report is expected soon.

In Alaska there are approximately 125,000 residents that do not have insurance, which is about 18 percent of the state’s population.

Republican Gov. Sean Parnell is expected to take the report and the U.S. Supreme Court decision into consideration in deciding how to proceed on the health care exchange issue. Spokeswoman Sharon Leighow declined to comment about contingency plans before the court’s ruling.

Read the full Supreme Court ruling here.

Southeast Catholics this weekend will celebrate the 75th birthday of the late Bishop Michael Kenny, the popular priest who worked tirelessly for human rights and world peace.

The third bishop of the Diocese of Juneau, which covers Southeast Alaska, Kenny died of an aneurysm in 1995 at the age of 57, while touring ancient Christian ruins in Jordan.

Kenny served the diocese for 16 years, from 1979 to 1995. He was admired by people of all faiths.

Bishop Edward Burns says a community reception and silent auction is Saturday evening at St. Ann’s Parish Hall. On Sunday afternoon, there’s a celebration mass and picnic potluck at the Shrine of St. Therese. Bishop Kenny is buried at the Shrine.

Burns says he has been hearing stories about Kenny for years, but never knew him.

“When I introduce myself as the Bishop of the Diocese of Juneau, so many people say to me, ‘Oh, I knew Bishop Kenny,’ and I always rejoice in hearing the stories they have to offer about him and the great gift of lift that he possessed,” Burns says. “Knowing that aspect of him and being honored to be one of his successors, I definitely wanted to do something like this as we commemorate his 75th birthday.”

Kenny protested the nuclear arms race and joined a human-rights delegation to Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. In 1991, he helped organize a reconciliation service to apologize for past wrongs by the Christian church against Alaska Natives.

The Juneau Assembly in 2009 named the park at Third and Seward Streets the Bishop Michael H. Kenny Memorial Peace Park. The idea was brought to the city by Juneau Veterans for Peace.

Kenny was known as a man of good humor, a strong supporter of the arts who seldom missed a musical or theatrical performance in Juneau, and a gourmet cook. Local arts organizations often auctioned off dinners with the Bishop for fundraisers.

Bishop Burns says it’s “important to remember those who help shape a community.”

Bishop Kenny 75th Memorial Celebration
Reception & silent auction, Saturday, 6 – 9 p.m., St. Ann’s Parish Hall
Liturgy and potluck picnic, Sunday, 1:30 p.m., Shrine of St. Therese

The priest of a downtown Juneau congregation that lost its church to arson has transferred to another parish.

The Reverend George Silides, of the Church of the Holy Trinity, has moved to St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in Claremont, California.

He and his wife, Hunter Silides, also a clergy member, ended their ministry at Holy Trinity on Sunday, June 3rd, after eight years in Juneau.

The church building was on the National Register of Historic Places when it burned in March 2006. Juneau Episcopalians had worshipped in the sanctuary for 110 years. For more than 50 years, adjoining McPetres Hall had been a community center.

As the congregation worked to rebuild, Silides called it a “refiner’s fire,” which it had become for so many church members and Juneau residents who had used the Holy Trinity facility over the years.

Silides often said the congregation “owned” the church:

“It’s the way the church operates, and how beautifully it operates and how extraordinarily responsible everyone is for the various things that they say they’re going to do that they follow through on,” Silidese said in a previous interview. “It’s obvious that they know the church is an expression of their ministry, not mine.”

On Christmas Eve 2009, the congregation held its first service in the new sanctuary. The church and McPhetres Hall were formally dedicated in October 2011.

The Silides had hoped to remain in Juneau at Holy Trinity for much longer, but one of their children needs ongoing medical treatment, more easily accessed in Claremont.

In a letter to the congregation announcing the move, The Reverend Silides said the family had been “blessed beyond measure” in Juneau.

The Reverend Wilson Valentine and parish members will fill in over the summer. The search for a new rector can take more than a year.

A new genetic-testing effort could provide more information about the connections Tlingits and Haidas have with other tribal groups. A University of Pennsylvania expert is in Southeast to collect DNA samples. He’s hoping for cooperation from those attending this week’s Celebration 2012 cultural festival in Juneau.

 

The effort is part of a larger project analyzing the genetics of indigenous North American groups.

Principal Investigator Theodore Schurr says it could ultimately map out human migration routes, as well as link tribes.

“So we’re slowly being able to put together … data to see the more deeper history questions, the connections between communities here with those across all of North American on the broader and deeper scale. But also some of these more regional or even tribally based questions which I think are already understood or are being examined through linguistic studies, historical studies and also oral histories and the work being done by the tribes themselves,” Schurr says.

Schurr will be at Juneau’s Centennial Hall during Celebration 2012, which runs Thursday through Saturday. He’s working with the Sealaska Heritage Institute, which organizes the event.

No one is required to participate. Those interested will have the insides of their cheeks swabbed to provide DNA samples. Those will be analyzed, and what’s learned will be shared with the volunteer. The information will also contribute to the larger research project.

A similar genetic testing effort was conducted in 2008 by Washington State University. Schurr says this project will examine additional elements.

“We are taking, I think, the same approach as the earlier study, although analyzing perhaps a number more markers for the maternal lineages and the paternal lineages,” Schurr says.

DNA samples have already been collected in Yakutat and Hydaburg. The effort at Celebration will reach people from many other communities.

Schurr hopes to expand the effort to other villages. But he’s collecting more than cheek swabs.

“Ultimately DNA evidence will tell you a lot about genetic lineages. But why people bear certain genetic lineages has to have some sort of context for interpreting that,” he says.

Those providing DNA samples will also be interviewed about their genealogy. Schurr says that, and other information, will allow for a higher level of analysis.

“It makes a big difference to have geological evidence, oral history information, the archeology or so forth. Because that tells us something about the context in which people have come to live in a place sometime, who they’ve come into contact with, and how far and wide they might have dispersed because of environmental factors (such as) glaciers, or volcanoes, or things of this sort. And how in fact the diversity we see in certain places may be linked with the languages they speak,” he says.

Work done so far has shown some differences between members of the Eagle and Raven moieties.

Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Worl, an anthropologist, has suggested the two groups were once members of different populations.

“I saw an earlier paper that he did where he begins to see that there is a difference and he was working with limited groups of people. But I think this will give him a larger population level to look at. I’m very hopeful,” Worl says.

She says the institute examined Schurr’s project carefully before agreeing to participate.

“I wanted to make sure that there would be no commercial use, that it would be for the specific purpose of this study. And if they were going to use it for other studies, they would have seek the permission of the donor and if the donor should die, that his or her heirs would make that decision,” she says.

Results should be available this year. Schurr says volunteers will find out about their individual data before group information is made public.

Learn more about the University of Pennsylvania’s Genographic Project: Molecular Genetic Analyses of Indigenous Populations of North America.

More South Korean shellfish has been recalled.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today (Monday) expanded a May 15th recall to include canned products, as well as fresh and frozen shellfish from South Korea. An FDA investigation into the Korean Shellfish Sanitation Program found serious problems, including norovirus in shellfish growing areas.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation confirms that four varieties of Crown Prince canned oysters from South Korea were distributed in the state, including:

-Crown Prince Whole Boiled Oysters
-Crown Prince Natural Whole Boiled Oysters
-Crown Prince Natural Smoked Oysters in Olive Oil
-Crown Prince Natural Smoked Oysters with Chili Pepper

DEC says customers who purchased any of the affected products should contact Crown Prince at 1-800-423-4676, or by email at orderpw@crownprince.com.