During ACA Open Enrollment, Picking a Plan Invites New COVID Complications

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.

How COVID-19 Highlights the Uncertainty of Medical Testing

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.

OSHA Let Employers Decide Whether to Report Health Care Worker Deaths. Many Didn’t.

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.

Thousands of Doctors’ Offices Buckle Under Financial Stress of COVID

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.

Why Employers Find It So Hard to Test for COVID

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?

Rural Areas Send Their Sickest Patients to Cities, Straining Hospitals

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.

Need a COVID-19 Nurse? That’ll Be $8,000 a Week

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.

Parents Complain That Pediatricians, Wary of COVID, Shift Sick Kids to Urgent Care

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.”