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California’s third-largest insurer faces anger from customers in the individual market who unexpectedly lost their insurance despite paying premiums faithfully. In its recently filed lawsuit, the company blamed a contractor for “egregious” billing problems.
Shepherd Smith, a strong supporter of abstinence-only sex education for AIDS, has been close to the new director of the CDC for decades. This connection is just one example of the “new in crowd” surrounding the Trump administration, where politics and religion mix.
Armed with poster board and catchy advertising slogans, abortion-rights activists in California and elsewhere are taking to sidewalks, buses and mobile phone apps to fight a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of crisis pregnancy centers.
Rather than go cold turkey, inmates increasingly have the option to take medication to help beat addiction to opioids and other substances. But some warn these substitute drugs serve as another crutch — and a costly one at that.
Critics worry about the message federal officials are sending by approving a new birth control option, which uses a mobile phone app for women to track their body temperature and menstrual cycle to avoid pregnancy. But the more choices the better, some reproductive health experts say.
The doctor most responsible for turning the sunshine supplement into a billion-dollar juggernaut has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the vitamin D industry, according to government records and interviews.
One doctor in Kansas works to make sure every hospital in the state can provide the soft start, ideally with their mothers, that babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome need.
Medicare limits payments for valve replacement via a catheter to hospitals with large numbers of heart procedures. But smaller facilities are crying foul.
Through a widely circulated brochure and a videotape of testimonials, the maker of OxyContin stressed patients’ right to opioid treatment for pain.
In this episode of KHN’s “What the Health?” Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo, Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times and Kimberly Leonard of the Washington Examiner talk about a spate of lawsuits involving the Affordable Care Act, as well as the latest in state and federal efforts regarding the Medicaid program for the poor.
About a quarter of fraud investigator positions at the state Department of Insurance are open, and Steve Poizner has made the vacancies a focus of his campaign for insurance commissioner. His opponent, Ricardo Lara, says chasing criminals isn’t the only solution to rising health care costs.
Some hospitals have taken steps to be more energy-efficient. Though at times these changes barely represent rounding errors in their budgets, comprehensive efforts are beginning to make a difference.
A new study in JAMA Surgery finds that a large sample of published medical research failed to disclose details on the financial relationships between medical device makers and physicians. Changes in the disclosure process could close this loop.
Even as it chips away at Obamacare, the Trump administration is solidly behind state-based initiatives to cover high-cost patients, known as “reinsurance” programs. It approved two more last month.
KHN’s Shefali Luthra talks about how the American Medical Association’s student caucus managed to push the overall organization to begin reviewing and possibly — eventually — reconsider its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care.
Unlike most other workers, private-ambulance employees are frequently called away from their meals and rest breaks to respond to emergency calls, but there’s no law explicitly allowing that practice. Proposition 11 would change that, but some say its real purpose is to get California’s largest ambulance company out of costly litigation.
Many insurers added surcharges to policies they sold to individuals last year to make up for a cut in federal funding. Now, federal officials suggest that states encourage insurers to sell policies without those surcharges outside of the marketplace to help people who don’t get a premium subsidy.
Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate has proposed using a wellness program inspired by the Cleveland Clinic for the state’s Medicaid population. But these types of plans are not new — they have a list of pros and cons, as well as regulatory issues.
With its expansion to Hawaii this year, medical aid-in-dying is now approved in eight U.S. jurisdictions. Even when legal, the controversial practice of choosing to die after a terminal diagnosis is difficult, said one Seattle man who shared his final deliberations.
Federal officials are proposing a rule to prohibit home health aides paid directly by Medicaid from having their dues for the powerful Service Employees International Union automatically deducted from their paychecks. The effort would likely mean those workers are far less likely to pay dues and could diminish the union’s influence.
