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Even though voters in Maine decided to expand Medicaid through a ballot measure, the law’s fate is still unclear. Gov. Paul LePage says the Legislature must find funds for it without raising taxes. Advocates say the law is on their side and expansion must be implemented.
Proponents say the proposed regulation will give some consumers more affordable insurance options. Critics warn that the coverage could be less comprehensive.
In this episode of “What The Health?” Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo and Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times discuss this week’s news, including release of the administration’s new rules on association health plans, as well as some health-related court rulings and other events that happened around the holidays.
Churches that offer marijuana as a sacrament are popping up across California and the U.S., vexing state and local officials who say they’re simply pot shops in disguise.
Vietnam veterans’ wartime experiences — and their lasting psychological toll — can make it harder to treat their physical and emotional pain as they approach death.
Laws in California and most other states allow pharmacists to provide naloxone to patients or their friends without a doctor’s prescription. But many don’t do so, citing lack of demand and awareness among patients, their own fears of insufficient compensation and the challenges of treating opioid users.
Pastor Gloria White-Hammond wants to get all 600 congregants to write down their end-of-life wishes and discuss them with their families.
Dr. Rana Awdish was completing a fellowship in critical care when she became critically ill herself. Now, she helps other doctors understand the patient’s perspective.
Emergency room doctors are seeing a growing number of marijuana users with a mysterious condition that causes extreme vomiting and abdominal pain.
Dental hygienists who treat frail and elderly residents in nursing homes and other facilities are dropping out of California’s publicly funded dental program for the poor because of recent changes that cut their pay and create more administrative hurdles.
Increasingly, owners of nursing homes outsource services to companies in which they also have financial interest or control. That allows the nursing homes to claim to be in the red while owners reap hidden profits.
Medicare is discouraging regional offices from levying fines for “one-time mistakes” or from using daily fines that seek to put pressure on nursing homes to make changes.
Premature death, a dearth of treatments, mistreatment in emergency rooms and a woeful lack of funding are just a few of the problems confronting people with sickle cell disease.
In a short-term spending bill, Congress extends money to the Children’s Health Insurance Program through March.
The FDA’s Scott Gottlieb says the agency is focused on the big picture, and he wants to know why pharma churns out drugs for some rare diseases but not for others.
Drugs that treat rheumatoid arthritis started out costing about $10,000 a year. Ten years later, they list for more than $40,000.
A Kaiser Health News analysis of federal inspection records shows that nursing home inspectors labeled mistakes in infection control as serious for only 161 of the 12,056 homes they have cited since 2014.
The House sought to eliminate the tax deduction, generally used by people with serious illnesses or those who need long-term care services but it was eventually restored in the final bill — and expanded.
As biosimilar products reach the market and rival more established RA treatments, the players are exploring legal challenges involving antitrust and anti-competitive behavior.
