The board of the Tennessee Hospital Association voted unanimously Monday to support a hospital-fee plan similar to one that has been strongly opposed by the association's counterpart in Georgia.

The Tennessee Hospital Association’s board of directors voted unanimously on Monday to support a tax on hospitals to help bolster hospitals that treat TennCare patients and offset steep cuts to the state’s Medicaid program.

Three years ago, at age 92, Marjorie Townley of Chattanooga felt resigned, seeing little chance for improvement in her quality of life.

Hospitals are divided over a proposal to lessen the blow from impending cuts to TennCare by imposing a fee on hospitals.

Revamping the structure of how health care is provided and paid for is a crucial health care reform for which there is broad support, the head of the state’s major lobbying and advocacy group for hospitals said.

North Georgia hospitals are "tremendously opposed" to a proposed tax on hospitals' net patient revenues, a fee that state officials say is the most palatable method to sustain the state's struggling Medicaid program.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, is asking a local hospital to extend a ban on hiring smokers to meat eaters, too.

For all the hemming and hawing over health care for the past year, medical ethicist Larry Churchill says the moral dimension of the debate has taken a back seat to political "sloganeering" and distortion.

A medical device half the size of a toothpick likely is the most important innovation now in the stroke "research pipeline," and Erlanger hospital's stroke center has more experience with it than any other facility in the world, the center's director told hospital trustees on Thursday.

Officials with Tennessee treatment centers for troubled or abused children say they are pulling together to care for dozens of children whose treatment plans have been affected by the impending closure of Cumberland Hall, an adolescent behavioral health facility.