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Clinicians working for Ascension hospitals in multiple states described harrowing lapses, including delayed or lost lab results, medication errors, and an absence of routine safety checks to prevent potentially fatal mistakes.
Michigan and Ohio serve as cautionary tales for states whose voters will decide abortion ballot initiatives this year: Even if the measures pass, it would take time to unwind conflicting laws.
New York and Michigan recently passed laws allowing local jurisdictions to lower speed limits, and Los Angeles voters backed safer road designs, but enforcement often meets political resistance. The number of pedestrians killed or injured on the road remains high.
The spread of an avian flu virus in cattle has again brought public health attention to the potential for a global pandemic. Fighting it would depend, for now, on 1940s technology that makes vaccines from hens’ eggs.
A man from Michigan was evacuated from a cruise ship after having seizures. First, he drained his bank account to pay his medical bills.
Nurses are telling lawmakers that there are not enough of them working in hospitals and that it risks patients’ lives. California and Oregon legally limit the number of patients under a nurse’s care. Other states trying to do the same were blocked by the hospital industry. Now patients’ relatives are joining the fight.
More doctors are integrating oral health care into their practices, filling a need in America’s dental deserts.
New Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley is promising to change how the agency reclaims billions of dollars it wrongly pays to beneficiaries, saying the existing process is “cruel-hearted and mindless.”
The expansion of Catholic hospitals nationwide leaves patients at the mercy of the church’s religious directives, which are often at odds with accepted medical standards.
Doctors, patients, and hospitals have railed for years about the prior authorization processes that health insurers use to decide whether they’ll pay for patients’ drugs or medical procedures. The Biden administration announced a crackdown in January, but some state lawmakers are looking to go further.
New York City is the latest jurisdiction to buy and forgive a backlog of unpaid medical bills for its residents. Local governments across the country, including in the Chicago area, are doing the same to reduce debt burdens for lower-income residents.
California’s governor vetoed a bill extending insurance coverage for kids with hearing loss, but most states now require it.
Delaying cancer treatment can be deadly — which makes the roadblock-riddled process that health insurers use to approve or deny care particularly daunting for oncology patients.
In the past year, opioid settlement money has gone from an emerging funding stream for which people had lofty but uncertain aspirations to a coveted pot of billions being invested in remediation efforts. Here are some important and evolving factors to watch going forward.
Cost estimates balloon and complications mount as the Defense Department grapples with PFAS pollution at hundreds of its bases and surrounding communities.
A pilot project in northern Minnesota aims to pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles to offer independence for people who can’t drive.
Being Black has always been dangerous for pregnant women and infants in the South. And researchers say things are continuing to move in the wrong direction.
At least 17 states have issued PFAS-related fish consumption advisories, KFF Health News found. But with no federal guidance, what is considered safe to eat varies significantly among states, most of which provide no regulation.
State and local governments will receive a windfall of more than $50 billion over 18 years from settlements with companies that made, sold, or distributed opioid painkillers. Using the funds for law enforcement has triggered important questions about what the money was meant for.
Michigan is one of the few remaining abortion havens in the Midwest. But getting an abortion in that state is still more difficult than it should be, providers say.
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