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Science Friday and KHN ran the numbers on birth control failure. Depending on the contraception method, typical-use error rates can add up to hundreds of thousands of unplanned pregnancies each year.
The nation’s largest private health system, HCA Healthcare, has faced years of scrutiny over its share of emergency room patients who are admitted to the hospital. And now U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, a Democrat from New Jersey, is calling for a federal investigation, prompting an escalating defense by the hospital system, based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Centene, the largest Medicaid managed-care company in the U.S., has thrown more than $26.9 million at political campaigns across the country since 2015, especially focused on states where it is wooing Medicaid contracts and settling accusations that it overbilled taxpayers. Among its tactics: Centene is skirting contribution limits by giving to candidates through its many subsidiaries.
Lengthy checklists from public health officials on handling emergencies miss vulnerable seniors who can’t always follow the recommendations.
Federal officials said they are penalizing 2,273 hospitals, the fewest since the fiscal year that ended in September 2014. Driving the decline was a change in the formula to compensate for the chaos caused by the covid-19 pandemic.
Complaints about misleading health insurance marketing are soaring. State insurance commissioners are taking notice. They’ve created a shared internal database to monitor questionable business practices, and, in the future, they hope to provide a public-facing resource for consumers. In the meantime, consumers should shop wisely as open enrollment season begins.
Public health investigators found that 53% of maternal deaths happened well after a mother left the hospital — from seven days to a year after the birth.
Despite the end of Jim Crow segregation, its legacy lives on in medical debt that disproportionately burdens Black communities.
Colorado, Florida, and Idaho are the latest states to opt out of a survey that tracks concerning behaviors in high school students. Officials cite low participation and state laws that require parental permission. But some advocates say dwindling state participation is an “enormous loss” that will make it harder to track signs of poor mental health — like drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal ideation — among teens.
A North Carolina state treasurer’s report found hospitals give conflicting information about whether they profit from Medicare patients. Experts said the findings are significant because they suggest the federal government has failed to closely watch the billions of dollars in tax breaks that nonprofit hospitals have received.
The Houma, an Indigenous tribe, has seen much of its Gulf Coast community washed away by rising sea levels and dangerous storms. Its leaders say the tribe’s lack of federal recognition makes it harder to keep rebuilding.
School lockdown drills are designed to prepare students for violent threats. But for some students, especially those with special needs, the drills can trigger or exacerbate mental health problems. Texas is taking a step toward balancing safety and mental health with new regulations around how the drills are conducted. “If some kids are coming away traumatized or we’re magnifying existing trauma, we’re not moving in the right direction,” one expert says.
Centene is trying to settle accusations of Medicaid pharmaceutical overcharging in Georgia, and the St. Louis-based company has been giving thousands of dollars to the campaigns of the state attorney general and the governor.
The cheaper over-the-counter aids are for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss — a market of tens of millions of people, many of whom have until now been priced out because prescription devices can cost thousands of dollars.
Hospitals, boosted by private equity-backed staffing companies, have embraced a new idea: the obstetrics emergency department. Often, it is just a triage room in the labor-and-delivery area, but it bills like the main emergency department.
Independent medical practices keep closing as doctors join behemoth hospital groups or leave the field. Research suggests that’s bad news for patients. Studies repeatedly conclude that consolidation in the health care industry is driving up costs while showing no clear evidence of improved care.
Creole-speaking public health workers teach women how to test themselves for HPV, the virus that causes some cervical cancers.
Hundreds of medical centers along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts face serious risks from even relatively weak storms as climate change accelerates sea-level rise — not to mention big ones like Category 4 Hurricane Ian.
The laws criminalizing abortion in many conservative U.S. states are expected to boost birth rates among teens, whose bodies often aren’t built for safe childbirth. For adolescents, the emotional and physical challenges of carrying a pregnancy to term can be daunting.
Penny Wingard, 58, of Charlotte, North Carolina, worries she won’t ever get out from under her medical debt despite new policies that are supposed to prevent medical debt from harming people’s credit scores.
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