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Change Healthcare, a firm recently bought by insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, reportedly suffered a cyberattack. The company processes 14 billion transactions annually, including payments and requests for insurance authorizations.
The Environmental Protection Agency is tightening regulation of ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas used to sterilize medical devices. The agency is trying to balance the interests of the health care industry supply chain with those of communities where the gas creates airborne health risks.
State lawmakers are resurrecting and expanding efforts to prohibit transgender people from using public restrooms and other spaces that match their gender. Some have sought to ban trans people from “sex-designated spaces,” including domestic violence shelters and crisis centers, which experts say could violate anti-discrimination laws and jeopardize federal funding.
State laws requiring doctor training on how bias affects treatment violate teachers’ right to free speech, opponents say.
Sky-high bills from air-ambulance providers have sparked complaints and federal action in recent years. But a rural Tennessee resident fell through the cracks of billing protections — and a single helicopter ride could cost much of her estate's value.
Illegal supplies of fentanyl are being cut with xylazine, a powerful horse tranquilizer. Overdoses involving this veterinary sedative are growing nationally and now Florida officials are tracking the deaths.
The state’s surgeon general grants parents permission to send unvaccinated children to school during a measles outbreak, risking their health and that of others.
A lack of oversight and standards for pregnancy care in jails is becoming more problematic as the number of incarcerated women rises and abortion restrictions put medical care further out of reach.
Lawsuits allege that several children under 18 in South Carolina have undergone examinations of their private parts during child abuse investigations — even when there were no allegations of sexual abuse. There’s a growing consensus in medicine that genital exams can be embarrassing, uncomfortable, and even traumatic.
More than a quarter century after an inmate helped start a hospice program in one of the nation’s most notorious prisons, he is trying to spread the idea.
While many Republican state lawmakers remain firmly against Medicaid expansion, some key leaders in holdout states are showing a willingness to reconsider. Public opinion, financial incentives, and widening health care needs make resistance harder.
After a decade of work, a Kentucky program launched to diagnose lung cancer earlier is beginning to change the prognosis for residents by catching tumors when they’re more treatable.
Doctors, patients, and hospitals have railed for years about the prior authorization processes that health insurers use to decide whether they’ll pay for patients’ drugs or medical procedures. The Biden administration announced a crackdown in January, but some state lawmakers are looking to go further.
For the first time, a jury has convicted a parent of a school shooter of charges related to the child’s crime, finding a mother in Michigan guilty of involuntary manslaughter and possibly opening a new legal avenue for gun control advocates. Meanwhile, as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, a medical publisher has retracted some of the journal studies that lower-court judges relied on in their decisions. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet, and Rachana Pradhan of KFF Health News join KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too.
While more Medicaid beneficiaries have been purged in the span of a year than ever before, enrollment is on track to settle at pre-pandemic levels.
Injectable penicillin is the go-to treatment for syphilis and the only treatment considered safe for pregnant people with the disease. But as rates of syphilis increase across the U.S., a shortage of the injectable has prompted some public health agencies to ration it.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion and many states banned the procedure, reproductive health care organizations hired dozens of people to help patients arrange travel and pay for care.
Ketamine, approved by the FDA as an anesthetic in 1970, is emerging as a major alternative mental health treatment, and there are now more than 500 ketamine clinics around the country. But with little regulation and widely varying treatment protocols, it’s a medical "wild West."
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