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Seniors are the fastest-growing segment of homeless Americans. Shelters are struggling to take in people with mobility issues and other chronic health conditions that can make living in a shelter nearly impossible. But specialized shelters for seniors are cropping up around the country to fill the gap.
As the crowdsourced investigative series from KFF Health News approaches its eighth anniversary, “Bill of the Month” offers its top takeaways of 2025 to help patients manage, decipher, and even fight their medical bills.
Regulations meant to prevent unfettered health care expansion are withholding needed hospital beds in a rural part of North Carolina. Here, as in communities around the country, some officials and health care providers are contesting such “certificate of need” laws.
The Trump administration has championed its Rural Health Transformation Program as an investment in American families who have been left behind. But Native American tribes, whose communities have a significant presence in rural America and have some of the greatest health needs, are ineligible to apply directly for funding.
Even as the federal government resumed funding the nation’s largest food assistance program, people risk losing access to the aid because of new rules.
Amid public forums and local cries for help, states are also talking with large health systems, technology companies, and others amid intensifying competition for shares of a $50 billion fund to improve rural health.
States are battling for their piece of $50 billion in federal rural health funding, but it’s not just hospitals vying for the money. Tech startups and policy demands are raising the stakes as Medicaid cuts loom.
People who maintained the nation’s land-based nuclear missile arsenal are coming down with similar cancers. The Air Force is wrapping up a large study of the health risks they may have faced.
Some states are enacting medical debt laws as the Trump administration pulls back federal protections. Elsewhere, industry opposition has derailed legislation.
Deborah Buttgereit knew piecing together the broken bone in her elbow would be expensive. But complications the doctor deemed a surprise, midsurgery, drove the total bill tens of thousands of dollars above the original estimate.
Doctors need to know when to screen for tick-borne diseases in their communities. But it’s getting harder for local health departments to get funding for tick surveys as federal public health grants from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dry up.
Montana has a waitlist for people with disabilities who need vocational training, even as schools and disability advocates are concerned about how federal cuts will affect those programs.
Buoyed by a Montana court ruling upholding state residents’ right to a “clean and healthful environment,” nearly two dozen people ages 7 to 24 hope to block the Trump administration’s executive orders on energy.
Independent and rural hospitals are collaborating with their neighbors to shore up their finances instead of joining larger health systems to stay afloat.
As states prepare to implement changes to Medicaid required by President Donald Trump’s recent tax-and-spending law, tribal leaders say they are concerned Native American enrollees could lose their coverage, despite exemptions made by Congress.
Some doctors and the groups that represent them say physicians’ extensive training leads to better emergency care, and that some hospitals are trying to save money by not hiring them. They support new laws in Indiana, Virginia, and South Carolina that require physicians to be on-site 24/7.
More than a dozen states are seeking their own versions of Medicaid work requirements. But the incoming federal standards pose questions around how much leeway states have to design their rules.
Native American tribes and health organizations are hosting clinics and calling patients to counteract low measles vaccination rates and limited access to health care as the disease spreads across the country.
Colorado, California, and Montana have passed neural data privacy laws meant to prevent the exploitation of brain information collected by consumer products.
Congressional Republicans successfully pushed to add hurdles to qualify for Medicaid by saying they would eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. This is the story of a Montana man who explains why he said he is breaking the rules to keep his health insurance and his job.
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