Come for Your Eye Exam, Leave With a Band-Aid on Your Arm
Dentists and optometrists across the country are trying to join in the fight to get everyone vaccinated against COVID-19, the flu and other diseases.
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Dentists and optometrists across the country are trying to join in the fight to get everyone vaccinated against COVID-19, the flu and other diseases.
COVID-19’s “long haulers” — patients with lingering effects of the disease — have joined the ranks of Americans with preexisting conditions. For those shopping for health coverage on the individual market, here’s help navigating an uncharted insurance landscape.
More than 93,000 COVID patients are hospitalized across the country. But beds and space aren't the main concern for hospital administrators — It's the health care workforce.
Widespread COVID testing has revealed uncomfortable truths about medical tests: A test result is rarely a definitive answer, but instead a single clue. A result may be falsely positive or negative, or it may show an abnormality that doesn’t matter. And as COVID testing has made too clear, even an accurate, meaningful result is useless unless it’s acted on appropriately.
State and local public health officials are sure that bars and restaurants are spreading COVID. But they don’t always have much concrete evidence to support their convictions.
Four workers died at a facility with one of the largest U.S. outbreaks, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration never conducted an inspection. It’s a pattern that’s played out across the nation, a KHN investigation finds.
Across the nation, primary care practices that were already struggling are closing, victims of the pandemic’s financial fallout. And this is reducing access to health care, especially in rural and other regions already short on doctors.
A Trump administration maneuver allows executives who are leading the federal effort to keep investments in drug companies that would benefit from the pandemic response.
COVID-19 cases are surging across the U.S., and most workplaces are still open for business. As workers fear catching the disease while on the clock, why aren’t more companies footing the bill for testing employees?
Small-business owners struggling to remain afloat are increasingly defying new shutdown orders, in some cases pointing to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry dinner as a reason not to comply.
Critically ill rural patients are often sent to city hospitals for high-level treatment, and as their numbers grow, some urban hospitals are buckling under the added strain. Meanwhile, mask-wearing and other pandemic prevention measures remain spotty in rural counties.
COVID-19’s toll weighs heavily on nurses, who can suffer stress and other psychological problems if they don’t believe they are able to help their patients sufficiently.
A shortage of nurses has turned hospital staffing into a sort of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant wages to secure the nurses they need. That threatens to shift the supply of nurses toward more affluent areas.
Referrals of children to urgent care clinics or emergency rooms have become so prevalent that the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with interim guidance on how practices can safely continue to see patients. The academy recommended that pediatricians strive "to provide care for the same variety of visits that they provided prior to the public health emergency."
Some consumers who received tax credits to purchase insurance from Affordable Care Act marketplaces report they’ve received letters in error from the government saying they didn’t file the IRS forms to account for how much money they made and how much funding they received from the government.
Eight months after California Healthline’s Heidi de Marco photographed LA under lockdown, she returned to the same iconic spots. Vehicle and foot traffic are up — as are coronavirus cases.
Although President-elect Joe Biden is free to meet with people who will be vital to carry out his administration’s fight against COVID, he and his transition team are blocked from conferring with federal officials because the Trump administration refuses to acknowledge Biden won the election. That could have a critical impact on Biden's efforts to help fight the coronavirus.
COVID-19 is spreading rapidly around the U.S. even before Thanksgiving promises to accelerate the trend. There are two promising vaccine candidates, but because President Donald Trump still refuses to concede the election and is holding up the official transition, President-Elect Joe Biden and his team cannot access plans for distributing those vaccines. Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
As coronavirus cases surge, state officials can’t afford to wait for a new president to take office before taking action. But some governors’ initiatives seem to be little more than policy tweaks or symbolic gestures.
KHN and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
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