Facing Financial Ruin as Costs Soar for Elder Care
The United States has no coherent system of long-term care, leading many to struggle to stay independent or rely on a patchwork of solutions.
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The United States has no coherent system of long-term care, leading many to struggle to stay independent or rely on a patchwork of solutions.
More than 16 million Americans who buy their own health insurance through state and federal marketplaces have until Jan. 15 to compare prices, change their coverage, or enroll for the first time.
Homicides, suicides, and drug overdoses have driven rising rates of pregnancy-related death in the U.S. This fall, six states received federal funding for substance use treatment interventions to prevent at least some of those deaths.
“People want covid-19 to be in the rearview mirror,” one nursing home official says. Faced with a slow rollout of the updated covid vaccines, and without state mandates for workers to get vaccinated, most skilled nursing facilities are relying on persuasion to boost vaccination rates among staff and residents.
A report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services raises troubling questions about the use of powerful medications within Florida’s child welfare system and the risk of overdoses or dangerous side effects if children are given the wrong combination of drugs.
Studies suggest official numbers vastly underestimate heat-related injuries and illness on the job. To institute protections, the government must calculate their cost — and the cost of inaction.
Where trees are growing — and who has access to their shade — affects health and well-being, especially in one of the hottest states in the country.
Recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery, a Tennessee woman said she spent months without a permanent mailing address and never got a bill. She was sued by the health system two years later.
As more states restrict gender-affirming care for transgender people, some are relocating to more welcoming destinations, such as California, Illinois, Maryland, and Nevada, where they don't have to worry about being locked out of medical care.
Cities and towns are again in deep waters this summer trying to hire enough lifeguards to open their public pools. Many are proceeding with sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity.
Colorado’s new Prescription Drug Affordability Board could cap what health plans and consumers pay for certain medications starting next year. The process will pit patient groups against one another.
The profound and painful loss — 80 million years of life, compared with the white population — is a call to action to improve the health of Black Americans, especially infants, mothers, and seniors, researchers say.
Individuals newly released from prison are 40 times as likely to die of opioid overdoses than members of the general population, researchers say. In response, California corrections officials aim to arm departing inmates with an antidote that can be used to reverse the effects of opioid poisoning.
“Pandora’s Gamble” describes how 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of wastewater potentially containing anthrax, Ebola, and other deadly pathogens spilled from an Army facility in Frederick, Maryland, in 2018.
A growing number of states — including Maryland, Colorado, and Massachusetts — are using tax forms to point people toward lower-cost health coverage available through state insurance marketplaces.
Mobile clinics that provided covid-19 testing and vaccines at the peak of the pandemic are now being used to provide a range of health services in hard-to-reach communities. A law passed late last year allows qualified health care centers to use federal grants to expand the fleets.
With their brains still developing and poor impulse control, teens who carry firearms might never plan to use them. But some do.
Consumer and patient advocates push for new federal rules to protect Americans from debt collectors and force hospitals to make financial assistance more accessible.
More states are moving to specialized managed-care contracts solely to handle medical and behavioral services for foster kids. But child advocates, foster parents, and even state officials say these and other care arrangements are shortchanging foster kids’ health needs.
In El Paso County, where five people were killed in a mass shooting at a nightclub in November, officials have filed relatively few emergency petitions to temporarily remove a person’s guns, with scant approvals.
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