Across North Carolina, Medical Debt Exacts a Heavy Toll
The state has among the highest levels of medical debt in the country, data shows.
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The state has among the highest levels of medical debt in the country, data shows.
State officials threatened to withhold public money from hospitals, pioneering a strategy that could become a national model.
A decades-old manufacturing company opened a clinic and made primary care and prescriptions free for employees and their families.
Ballad Health, a 20-hospital system with the nation's largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly, serves patients in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
Federal law requires states to provide pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage through 60 days after delivery. Arkansas has not expanded what’s called postpartum Medicaid coverage, an option that gives poor women uninterrupted health insurance for a year after they give birth.
California lawmakers are moving to rein in the pharmaceutical middlemen they say drive up costs and limit consumers’ choices. The bill sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom would require pharmacy benefit managers to be licensed in California and would ban some business practices. Newsom vetoed a previous effort three years ago.
Georgia must decide soon whether to try to extend a limited Medicaid expansion that requires participants to work. Enrollment fell far short of goals in the first year, and the state isn’t yet able to verify participants are working.
The recent shooting at Apalachee High School outside of Atlanta caused more than physical wounds. Medical experts worry a lack of mental health resources in the community — and in Georgia as a whole — means few options for those trying to cope with trauma from the shooting.
Many Catholic health systems, which are tax-exempt, pay their executives millions and can charge some of the highest prices around — while critics say they scrimp on commitments to their communities.
The generally combative face-off was marked by a series of false and sometimes bizarre statements from former President Donald Trump.
John Baackes, who steered Medi-Cal’s largest health plan following the Affordable Care Act expansion, and later prepared it for a state overhaul of Medi-Cal, will retire after this year. Baackes believes low payments to doctors and other providers, along with an acute labor shortage, hamper Medi-Cal’s success.
In this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with Caitlyn Mai, a woman in Oklahoma who received a six-figure bill for a surgery her insurance promised to cover. This episode is an extended version of the “Bill of the Month” series, produced in partnership with NPR.
Vice President Kamala Harris is seen as more aggressive than former President Donald Trump in taking on pharmaceutical companies, but Trump allies say he would also make lowering drug costs a top priority.
KFF Health News and The New York Times are looking into a dreaded “adulting” milestone: finding your own medical insurance at 26.
KFF Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media in the last two weeks to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
A collection agency sought court authority to garnish a patient’s wages to pay a disputed surgery bill. But after the patient showed up in court to argue the bill was bogus, the judge declined to let the bill collector seize her money.
The end of pandemic-era Medicaid coverage protections coincided with changes in more than a dozen states to expand coverage for lower-income people, including children, pregnant women, and the incarcerated.
While fighting potential fraud in government programs has long been a conservative rallying cry, recent criticisms of the Affordable Care Act represent a renewed line of attack on the program when repealing it is unlikely.
This installment of InvestigateTV and KFF Health News’ “Costly Care” series digs into patients' getting charged hospital prices for doctor’s office care. For five years, a patient got the same injection from the same office. Then it changed how it billed and she owed more than $1,100 for one treatment.
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