MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked on a plan to expand health care coverage in the U.S. years before the Affordable Care Act, visited with young patients Thursday at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where families of patients suffering from pediatric cancer and other illnesses pay nothing for treatment, travel, housing and food.
The former Secretary of State then spoke at the opening of the Marlo Thomas Center for Global Education and Collaboration on the campus of the Memphis hospital. Thomas, an actress and the daughter of St. Jude founder Danny Thomas, is the face of the hospital’s national outreach efforts and a winner of the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
St. Jude is considered a leading researcher of cancer and other life-threatening diseases that affect children. The hospital says it is working to increase the overall survival rate for childhood cancer to 90 percent in the next decade. The hospital relies heavily on donations from the public, which makes up three-quarters of the hospital’s funding, said Richard Shadyac Jr., president and CEO of St. Jude’s fundraising organization.
“This is what health care should look like. Patients before profits. Collaboration before competition. And that is particularly the health care that every single child deserves,” she said. The statement drew applause from the audience.
It was Clinton’s second visit to St. Jude. She first came in 1994, when she was first lady and her husband, Bill Clinton, was in his first term. She led a 1993 task force that unsuccessfully sought legislation in Congress to achieve universal health care coverage.
Hillary Clinton thanked the hospital’s employees and its board of directors, whom she called generous and dedicated. She also made reference to the fact that patients pay don’t pay for treatment.
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - A 2,400-soldier combat aviation unit that recently returned from a deployment to Afghanistan will be deactivated at Fort Campbell and its members sent elsewhere, the Army announced Thursday, as overseas wars wind down and the military continues to reorganize and downsize.
Army spokesman Matthew Bourke said the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade is the only deactivation being announced Thursday.
Army spokesman Lt. Col Donald Peters told The Associated Press the decision stemmed from “the need to organize aviation assets to best support operational requirements under significant fiscal constraints.”
The unit’s shutdown will leave the military post on the Kentucky-Tennessee state line with a total population of 26,500 soldiers by the end of Fiscal Year 2015 next October.
Most of the soldiers in the brigade will be reassigned to new units, some within the 101st Airborne Division.
Peters said the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, also stationed at Fort Campbell, will continue to support operational and training requirements of the 101st Airborne Division and its subordinate units.
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - One of the nation’s leading opponents of the education reform movement said Thursday that a public review process the governor has created for Tennessee’s Common Core standards can be effective if teachers’ ideas are taken seriously.
Education historian Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and former U.S. assistant education secretary, was in Nashville to speak at a conference of career and technical education professionals.
Her visit comes during the same week Tennessee lawmakers filed measures to do away with the state’s Common Core standards.
While she opposes the standards, Ravitch said there’s no harm in getting public input about them, as long as what teachers say is taken seriously because of their close relationship with students.
“I’d rather see the teachers review the standards, because I think the teachers know what kids can do,” said Ravitch, adding that teachers should be the ones to construct the standards.
Common Core is a set of English and math standards that spell out what students should know and when. The standards - which have been adopted by most of the states - are intended to provide students with the critical thinking, problem solving and writing skills needed for college and the workforce.
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ORANGE BEACH, Ala. (AP) - Ruby Holt spent most of her 100 years on a farm in rural Tennessee, picking cotton and raising four children. She never had the time or money to go to a beach.
That changed this month, just a few weeks shy of Holt’s 101st birthday.
Thanks to a partnership between the assisted living center where Holt lives and an organization that grants wishes to the elderly, Holt got to see the ocean for the first time during an all-expenses-paid trip to the Gulf of Mexico.
Holt laughed and grinned as cool Gulf waters hit her feet for the first time, and she walked across the white sand with the help of aides from the home.
She said she’d never seen anything as big as the ocean. But in the November chill she kept saying over and over: “It’s cold.”
“I’ve heard people talk about it and how wonderful it was and wanted to see it, but I never had the opportunity to do so,” Holt said.
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