Readers Take Congress to Task and Offer Their Own Health Policy Fixes
KFF Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.
201 - 220 of 1,226 Results
KFF Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
During a California gubernatorial debate, candidates promised to protect people’s access to health care and fight back against Trump administration cuts. With the contest a year away, polling shows voters want the next governor to minimize out-of-pocket health care costs, increase mental health care, and expand caregiving services.
As health systems, doctor groups, and insurers merge into ever-bigger giants, patient care gets more expensive. Yet the Trump administration has sent mixed signals about its willingness to intervene — and shown some disdain for Biden officials’ more aggressive approach.
As voters feel financial pressure from runaway health care costs and crave innovations that would provide relief, the standoff in Congress has been firmly rooted in the status quo — keeping an existing provision of the Affordable Care Act alive.
KFF Health News journalists made the rounds on national and local media recently to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
Through shrouded bureaucratic maneuvers, White House budget director Russell Vought and DOGE have quietly upended outbreak response, HIV treatment, and dementia care in communities across America.
The Trump administration has directed visa officers to consider common health ailments, including obesity and diabetes, when would-be immigrants seek visas to enter the U.S.
States from California to Texas say they rely on tens of millions in federal funding to help them prepare for the next pandemic, cyberattack, or mass-casualty catastrophe. The Trump administration wants to cut it.
Small-business owners and their employees, who make up nearly half of the Obamacare marketplace, are worried about their health care and their livelihoods as insurance prices surge. Republicans, who have long opposed Obamacare, are at odds over how to respond to upset from one of their party’s most loyal constituencies.
Clinicians and researchers are starting to embrace an effort to develop what’s known as “shame competence” in physicians to combat burnout and prevent that uncomfortable emotion from being passed along to patients.
This year, Affordable Care Act marketplace consumers will need to be more informed than ever to navigate their health coverage choices.
Federal health authorities have taken the "unprecedented" step of instructing states to investigate certain individuals on Medicaid to determine whether they are ineligible because of their immigration status, with five states reporting they’ve received more than 170,000 names collectively.
KFF Health News journalists made the rounds on national and local media recently to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
Although racial disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of multiple myeloma remain, Black survivors of multiple myeloma say the latest developments in treatment give them hope even as federal research cuts create a grim forecast for cancer research.
A standoff in Congress is keeping much of the government shut down as open enrollment begins in most states for Affordable Care Act plans. Democrats are demanding Republicans agree to extend ACA tax credits, but there has been little negotiating — even as customers are learning what they’ll pay for coverage next year. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is telling states they can’t pass their own laws to keep medical debt off consumers’ credit reports. Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Maya Goldman of Axios, and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico join KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner to discuss those stories and more.
California now has a law requiring hospitals and clinics to improve patient privacy and have clear protocols for handling requests by immigration agents. Legal experts say the state can’t fully protect immigrant patients, because federal authorities are allowed in public places, including hospital lobbies, general waiting areas, and parking lots.
Under the budget law that Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, food assistance for refugees will be sliced. The change is sowing fear, uncertainty, and a struggle for survival — a sign of what’s to come for millions of Americans.
The HHS office that administers the Title X family planning program has been effectively shut down. And with cuts to federal funding for other family health programs, expected Medicaid cuts, and the potential lapse of ACA subsidies, health leaders fear they are seeing the biggest setback to U.S. reproductive care in half a century.
Reversing guidance from the Biden administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concludes that states cannot bar medical debt from their residents’ credit reports.
Health care professionals fear that new caps on federal student lending, set to start in July, will put medical school out of reach for many who want to become doctors and exacerbate physician shortages. Others say unlimited federal lending has fed a rise in academic costs, saddling families and, ultimately, taxpayers with debt.
© 2026 KFF