Which hospital is it that your wife worked at? I'm surprised that if your wife worked in New Orleans, she didn't know that Memorial was a private hospital. I grew up several blocks away from that hospital and my father practiced there for 35 years. It has never been run by the government. It was originally a private hospital named Southern Baptist Hospital, merged with the local Mercy hospital in the 1990's, and was eventually bought by Tenet which is a private healthcare corporation. Tenet, incidentally, is selling Memorial along with a couple other New Orleans-area hospitals on which they have been losing money, to Oschner Clinic, which is another private group. Charity Hospital was the hospital that was "state-run" and staffed by LSU and Tulane medical centers, and from all reports, the conditions there were worse than at Memorial.
I spoke with my dad today about the charges, and he and almost everyone that he knows who worked at Memorial are extremely upset about the arrests. Apparently the two nurses who are charged are well known as good nurses and good people. Their lawyers had been told repeatedly that if any arrests were to be made, it would be done through the attorneys and they would have the chance to turn themselves in. Instead, 5 squad cars were sent to one of the nurses' homes shortly before midnight. Her husband and teenage child were forced to stand on the lawn and watch her get handcuffed and driven away in a police car. Her home is now surrounded by media. This looks to me like grandstanding, as if it has been deliberately designed to create a media frenzy.
I can only imagine how terrible the conditions were in that hospital after 3 or 4 days of no electricity, and frankly it's amazing to me that only 10 of Memorial's patients died (the other 20+ patients who died at Memorial were part of a separate long-term care facility that was located within the hospital, but was owned and staffed by an entirely different healthcare group--different nurses, doctors, administrators, for all purposes a different hospital). Obviously no one knows exactly what happened except those who were there, but I am strongly suspect that the medications were given to alleviate suffering, not with the intent to kill, as the bioethicist from the U. of Minnesota says at the end of this article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060718/ap_on_re_us/katrina_hospital_deaths;_ylt=AiLs9sLR4ITyrGhyzJKW87Ws0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-