For Gay Men, Gaps In HIV Knowledge And Treatment Persist
This KHN story can be republished for free. (details) Saturday is National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, but the news about knowledge and treatment of HIV in the gay community is dispiriting. Just 30 percent of gay and bisexual men say they were tested for HIV within the last year as recommended; another 30 percent […]
Insurance Brokers Key To Kentucky’s Obamacare Success
More than 40 percent of the people who signed up for insurance on Kynect, Kentucky’s exchange, used an insurance broker.
Dying In America Is Harder Than It Has To Be, IOM Says
Comprehensive report on end-of-life care says both medicine and society need to change “to make those final days better.”
Wrestling With A Texas County’s Mental Health System
Strong leadership and common-sense budgeting created a model mental health care system in San Antonio.
San Antonio Police Have Radical Approach To Mental Illness: Treat It
With specialized training and a redirection of resources, San Antonio’s police force is taking better care of mentally ill people, keeping them out of jail and saving $10 million a year.
Obamacare Help Was In High Demand, Survey Shows
Most working people in the U.S. sign up for health insurance in a very straightforward way: a few forms, a few questions for human resources, a few choices of plans. Signing up for Affordable Care Act insurance was nothing like that. It involved questions about income, taxes, family size and immigration status. And in most […]
Report: Adults With Serious Mental Illnesses Face 80% Unemployment
This KHN story can be republished for free. (details) Employment rates for people with a serious mental illness are dismally low and getting worse, according to a report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Just 17.8 percent of people receiving public mental health services were employed in 2012 – down from 23 percent in […]
Pelvic Exams No Longer Recommended For Well-Woman Visits
The American College of Physicians announced a major change to their screening guidelines Monday evening: Healthy women should no longer receive pelvic exams during their annual well-woman visits. The recommendation does not apply to women who are pregnant or who have symptoms of pelvic disease. “It’s an intrusive test, it’s a test women don’t like, […]
Study Puts A Price Tag On Autism
Autism exacts a heavy toll on families across the country, but what is the financial cost of the disorder? Now we have an actual price tag: the lifetime cost of supporting a person with autism ranges from $1.4 million to $2.4 million in the United States, depending on whether the person also has an intellectual […]
Coast-to-Coast Health Care Woe: Cost
On a reporter’s cross country road trip, Americans talk about all the health policy highlights
What’s A Surgeon’s Role In An ACO? Not Much So Far, Survey Says
Accountable Care Organizations have given little attention to surgery in the early years of the Medicare program, choosing to focus instead on managing chronic conditions and reducing hospital readmissions. That’s according to a case study and survey published this week in the journal Health Affairs. The authors conducted case studies at four ACOs in 2012 […]
Parents Of Mentally Ill Adult Children Frustrated By Privacy Law
Even if parents are providing health insurance, they often can’t find out about what’s happening when their adult children suffer from severe mental illnesses.
With Medical Debts Rising, Doctors Are More Aggressive About Payments
Between 2008 and 2012, multispecialty practices saw their bad debt go up 14 percent, according to a recent survey, and some have begun to change their business practices in response.
Report: Jails House 10 Times More Mentally Ill Than State Hospitals
In 44 states and the District of Columbia, at least one prison or jail holds more people with serious mental illnesses than the largest state psychiatric hospital, according to a report released Tuesday by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association. Across the country, an estimated 356,268 people with mental illnesses including bipolar […]
Consumers Get $10B In Subsidies For Health Coverage, Study Finds
Americans have already qualified for about $10 billion in tax credits to help them purchase private health insurance this year through the Affordable Care Act, according to a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.) That’s an average of $2,890 for each of the 3.5 million people […]
60,000 With HIV Left Uninsured In States Not Expanding Medicaid
The Affordable Care Act is generally a win for people living with HIV and AIDS, about 30 percent of whom are uninsured. It offers new health insurance options — both private and public — to a group that had been largely locked out of the individual insurance market because of rules about preexisting conditions. In […]
New ACA Insurance Causes Headaches In Some Doctors’ Offices
Employees in some Texas practices spend hours on hold trying to verify that patients have new insurance.
ACOs Saving Some Money, But Medicare Is Short On Details
Accountable care organizations are saving some money, though what exactly that means is still unclear. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Thursday that overall, provider groups involved in Medicare ACO programs saved a total of $380 million in the first year. Sounds like a lot of money, but CMS declined to explain which […]
To Schedule A Doc Visit, Get In Line
Need to see a doctor? You may have to wait. A survey of physician practices in 15 metropolitan areas across the country, which was taken before the health law expanded coverage, found that the average wait time for a new patient to see a physician in five medical specialties was 18.5 days. The longest waits were […]
We’ve had a lot of response from readers and listeners to our story on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, The Clubfoot Correction: How Parents Pushed For Better Treatment. Readers wrote that they or their children had received casting and boots-and-bars treatment for clubfoot. Some happened many decades ago—some fairly recently. We thought some more explanation […]
