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More Communities Are Giving Flavored Tobacco the Boot. Will California Follow?
San Jose and Sacramento this summer joined scores of other California cities and counties that have banned the sale of flavored tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes and candy-flavored e-cigs. In November, California voters will decide whether to allow a statewide ban to take effect.
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Indiana’s New Abortion Ban May Drive Some Young OB-GYNs to Leave a State Where They’re Needed
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indiana OB-GYN, was publicly vilified for providing an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim. That treatment and new abortion restrictions in the state have left some medical residents reconsidering whether they will practice in Indiana.
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KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: Wrapping Up Summer’s Health News
President Joe Biden has signed the Inflation Reduction Act and Congress is gone until after Labor Day. But the administration and lawmakers left lots of health policy achievements behind, including new rules to facilitate the sale of over-the-counter hearing aids and a potential reorganization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, and Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also, for extra credit, the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
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Local Health Officials to Feds: Where’s the Rest of Our Monkeypox Vaccine?
Los Angeles County is getting 60% fewer doses of monkeypox vaccine than officials expected, after the FDA said every vial could be split into five shots.
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Some Rural Hospitals Are in Such Bad Shape, Local Governments Are Practically Giving Them Away
Coming out of the pandemic, many rural hospitals are in even rougher shape than before. So rough that some are now practically being handed to investors for little more than a pledge to keep them open.
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Public Health Agencies Adapt Covid Lessons to Curb Overdoses, STDs, and Gun Violence
Know-how gained through the covid pandemic is seeping into other public health areas. But in a nation that has chronically underfunded its public health system, it’s hard to know which changes will stick.
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After Wiping Out $6.7 Billion in Medical Debt, This Nonprofit Is Just Getting Started
Nonprofit RIP Medical Debt buys up unpaid hospital bills plaguing low-income patients and frees them from having to pay.
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On the Wisconsin-Illinois Border: Clinics in Neighboring States Team Up on Abortion Care
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Wisconsin banned nearly all abortions. To preserve access, now more than a dozen providers are traveling across the border into Illinois to treat patients. This partnership between Planned Parenthood organizations could be a model as dozens of abortion clinics close across the U.S.
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Buy and Bust: Collapse of Private Equity-Backed Rural Hospitals Mired Employees in Medical Bills
The U.S. Labor Department investigates Noble Health after former employees of its shuttered Missouri hospitals say the private equity-backed owner took money from their paychecks and then failed to fund their insurance coverage.
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‘Still a Lot of Pain’: Four Years After Mass Shooting, Texas Community Grapples With Fallout
Santa Fe, Texas, was a mental health care desert until a 17-year-old gunman killed 10 people at the local high school in 2018. Now the city, which sits in a rural stretch between Houston and Galveston, has a resiliency center, where anyone affected by the shooting can get free counseling. But even with an influx of mental health care, the community struggles with the aftermath.
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For Medically Vulnerable Families, Inflation’s Squeeze Is Inescapable
Inflation hasn’t hit Americans like this in decades. And families living with chronic diseases have little choice but to pay more for the medicine, supplies, and food they need to stay healthy.
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Community Health Centers’ Big Profits Raise Questions About Federal Oversight
Nonprofit federally funded health centers are a linchpin in the nation’s health care safety net because they treat the medically underserved. The average profit margin is 5%, but some have recorded margins of 20% or more in three of the past four years.
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Watch: How Nursing Homes Put Friends and Families on the Hook for Residents’ Debts
In pursuit of unpaid bills, nursing homes across Rochester, New York, have been suing relatives and friends of their residents. This CBS News report, done in partnership with a KHN-NPR investigation, takes a look at the practice and tells the stories of some of the people affected.
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Abortion Is Just the Latest Dividing Line Between the Twin Cities of Bristol and Bristol
The community of Bristol straddles the border between two states with very different abortion laws. Tennessee prohibits most abortions at about six weeks and will soon ban them nearly outright. Virginia allows them at least through the second trimester. To maintain abortion access in the area, staff at a clinic on the Tennessee side of the state line are helping open a clinic about a mile down the road on the Virginia side.
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Big Pharma Went All In to Kill Drug Pricing Negotiations
For more than a century, the drug industry has issued dire warnings of plunging innovation whenever regulation reared its head. In general, the threat hasn’t materialized.
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Inflation Reduction Act Contains Important Cost-Saving Changes for Many Patients — Maybe for You
The legislation, which the House is expected to pass Friday, would allow the federal government, for the first time, to negotiate the price of some drugs that Medicare buys. It also would extend the enhanced subsidies for people who buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
