Author: Avisoscuba
HELENA, Mont. — A last-minute change to a 2019 bill put an end date on Montana’s Medicaid expansion program, setting the stage for what is anticipated to be the most significant health care debate of the 2025 Montana Legislature. In recent interviews, legislative leaders predicted a vigorous debate over keeping the Medicaid expansion program, which pays the medical bills of more than 75,000 low-income Montanans at an annual cost of about $1 billion to the federal and state governments. They also expect the topic to seep into other health policy decisions, such as the approval of new spending on Montana’s…
On the heels of a scuttled hospital merger between rivals in Terre Haute, Indiana, a state senator introduced a bill that would forbid similar mergers in the future. Last year, nonprofit Union Health tried to acquire the only other acute care hospital in Vigo County by leveraging a state law it helped create that allows hospital monopolies. Now, Sen. Ed Charbonneau, a key architect of the 2021 law, which allows what is known as a “Certificate of Public Advantage,” or COPA, wants to repeal it. “I didn’t think I was doing 100% the right thing last time,” the Republican, who…
Angela Hart and Christine Mai-Duc SACRAMENTO, California.— Seis años después de asumir el cargo prometiendo ser el “gobernador de la salud” de California, el demócrata Gavin Newsom ha destinado decenas de miles de millones de dólares de fondos públicos a servicios de la red de seguridad para los residentes más necesitados del estado, mientras diseña reglas para hacer que la atención médica sea más accesible y asequible para todos los californianos. Más de un millón de residentes de California que viven en Estados Unidos sin papeles ahora califican para Medi-Cal, la versión estatal de Medicaid: ha sido uno de los…
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Six years after he entered office vowing to be California’s “health care governor,” Democrat Gavin Newsom has steered tens of billions in public funding to safety net services for the state’s neediest residents while engineering rules to make health care more accessible and affordable for all Californians. More than a million California residents living in the U.S. without authorization now qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, making California among the first states to cover low-income people regardless of their immigration status. The state is experimenting with Medicaid money to pay for social services such as…
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday issued new regulations barring medical debts from American credit reports, enacting a major new consumer protection just days before President Joe Biden is set to leave office. The rules ban credit agencies from including medical debts on consumers’ credit reports and prohibit lenders from considering medical information in assessing borrowers. These rules, which the federal watchdog agency proposed in June, could be reversed after President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20. But by finalizing the regulations now, the CFPB effectively dared the incoming Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress to…
By Dan Weissmann January 7, 2025 Article HTML Dan Weissmann Joey Ballard is an internal medicine resident at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He wrote to “An Arm and a Leg” about a resolution the American Medical Association recently adopted calling on hospitals to do more to make sure patients who qualify for charity care get it. And that legislators and regulators make sure that’s happening. Ballard helped write that resolution. He told “An Arm and a Leg” host Dan Weissmann that he first heard about charity care after listening to an episode of the podcast. Ballard spoke with Weissmann about…
When Michael Adams was researching health insurance options in 2023, he had one very specific requirement: coverage for prosthetic limbs. Adams, 51, lost his right leg to cancer 40 years ago, and he has worn out more legs than he can count. He picked a gold plan on the Colorado health insurance marketplace that covered prosthetics, including microprocessor-controlled knees like the one he has used for many years. That function adds stability and helps prevent falls. But when his leg needed replacing last January after about five years of everyday use, his new marketplace health plan wouldn’t authorize it. The…
Cara Anthony KFF Health News Midwest correspondent Cara Anthony and Emily Kwong, host of NPR’s podcast “Shortwave,” talk about Black families living in the aftermath of lynchings and police killings in their communities. Anthony shares her southeastern Missouri-based reporting from “Silence in Sikeston,” a documentary film, podcast, and print reporting project. She discusses the latest research on the health effects of racism and violence, including the emerging, controversial field of epigenetics. Hear the full podcast episodes Anthony and Kwong reference from “Silence in Sikeston” here. They discuss material from Episode 1, “Racism Can Make You Sick”; Episode 2, “Hush, Fix…
In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near a storefront advertising “free” cellphones, J.R. sat in an empty back stairwell and showed a reporter how he tries to avoid overdosing when he smokes crack cocaine. KFF Health News is identifying him by his initials because he fears being arrested for using illegal drugs. It had been several hours since his last hit, and the chatty, middle-aged man’s hands moved quickly. In one hand, he held a glass pipe. In the other, a lentil-size crumb of cocaine. Or at least J.R. hoped it was cocaine, pure cocaine — uncontaminated by fentanyl, a potent opioid…
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — More than three years have passed since federal health officials arrived in central Appalachia to assess an alarming outbreak of HIV spread mostly between people who inject opioids or methamphetamine. Infectious disease experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a list of recommendations following their visit, including one to launch syringe service programs to stop the spread at its source. But those who’ve spent years striving to protect people who use drugs from overdose and illness say the situation likely hasn’t improved, in part because of politicians who contend that such programs encourage illegal…
The Host Julie Rovner KFF Health News @jrovner Read Julie’s stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition. This week, KFF Health News’ “What the Health?” presents a conversation with Francis Collins, former National Institutes of Health director and White House science adviser. Collins, the longest-serving presidentially appointed head of the nation’s crown jewel of biomedical research,…
BAKER CITY, Ore. — In what has become a routine event in rural America, a hospital maternity ward closed in 2023 in this small Oregon town about an hour from the Idaho border. For Shyanne McCoy, 23, that meant the closest hospital with an obstetrician on staff when she was pregnant was a 45-mile drive away over a mountain pass. When McCoy developed symptoms of preeclampsia last January, she felt she had the best chance of getting the care she needed at a larger hospital in Boise, Idaho, two hours away. She spent the final week of her pregnancy there,…
In 2024, our nationwide team of gumshoes set out to answer your most pressing questions about medical bills, such as: Can free preventive care really come with add-on bills for items like surgical trays? Or, why does it cost so much to treat a rattlesnake bite? Or, if it’s called an urgent care emergency center, which is it? Affording medical care continues to be among the top health concerns facing Americans today. In the seventh year of KFF Health News’ “Bill of the Month” series, readers shared their most perplexing, vexing, and downright expensive medical bills and asked us to…
Bill Hall, 71, has been fighting for his life for 38 years. These days, he’s feeling worn out. Hall contracted HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS, in 1986. Since then, he’s battled depression, heart disease, diabetes, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney cancer, and prostate cancer. This past year, Hall has been hospitalized five times with dangerous infections and life-threatening internal bleeding. But that’s only part of what Hall, a gay man, has dealt with. Hall was born into the Tlingit tribe in a small fishing village in Alaska. He was separated from his family at age 9 and sent to a…
MIAMI — When leaders of Florida’s most populous county met in September to pick a site for what could become the nation’s largest trash incinerator, so many people went to the government center to protest that overflow seating spilled into the building’s atrium. “MIRAMAR SAYS NO TO INCINERATOR! NOT IN OUR BACKYARD,” read green T-shirts donned by some attendees who wanted to stop the new industrial waste facility — capable of burning up to 4,000 tons of garbage a day — from being built near their homes. Residents feared the site would not only sink their property values and threaten…
Angela Hart LAS VEGAS — Case manager Bryon Johnson flashed a light into a dark tunnel beneath the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip on a recent fall afternoon. He stepped into an opening in a concrete ditch littered with trash and discarded clothing to search an underground world for his homeless clients. Beneath the Caesars Palace hotel and casino, Johnson found one of them stretched out on a plywood bed. Jay Flanders, 49, had sores across his back, up his arms, and into his fingers. The homeless man acknowledged occasional meth use and mental health concerns. He couldn’t recall…
LAS VEGAS — Maurice Clark huddled in his tent along dusty railroad tracks as two homeless-outreach workers began asking him questions to determine whether he would qualify for free or subsidized housing. Did he use drugs? Had he ever been in jail? How many times had he been to an emergency room? Had he been attacked on the streets? Tried to harm himself? Engaged in sex for money? Clark didn’t feel comfortable being honest with the two surveyors he’d never met before, who were flanked by police officers as they recorded his responses from a questionnaire on a tablet. “I’ve…
Dan Weissmann “An Arm and a Leg” updates a popular episode from 2019 — a story about giving. In 1980, a young father named Denny Buehler was battling leukemia and needed to travel from Ohio to Seattle for treatment. To raise money for the trip, his friends and family organized a softball tournament. Denny passed away a few months later, but his friends and family turned the softball tournament into a beloved tradition. For more than 40 years, they have hosted the games and sold hot dogs to raise money for other people in the area who need help with…
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A western New York health insurance provider for seniors and the CEO of its medical analytics arm have agreed to pay a total of up to $100 million to settle Justice Department allegations of fraudulent billing for health conditions that were exaggerated or didn’t exist. Independent Health Association of Buffalo, which operates two Medicare Advantage plans, will pay up to $98 million. Betsy Gaffney, CEO of medical records review company DxID, will pay $2 million, according to the settlement agreement. Neither admitted wrongdoing. “Today’s result sends a clear message to the Medicare Advantage community that the United States will take…
Elisabeth Rosenthal Over 6½ years ago, KFF Health News and NPR kicked off “Bill of the Month,” a crowdsourced investigation highlighting the impact of medical bills on patients. The goal was to understand how the U.S. health care system generates outsize bills and to empower patients with strategies to avoid them. We asked readers and listeners to submit their bills — and they kept coming. “Bill of the Month” has received nearly 10,000 submissions, each a picture of a health system’s dysfunction and the financial burden it places on the patients. Since 2018, we have analyzed bills totaling almost $6.3…
It seems simple: Require hospitals and insurers to post their negotiated prices for most health care services and — bingo — competition follows, yielding lower costs for consumers. But nearly four years after the first Trump administration’s regulations forced hospitals to post massive amounts of pricing information online, the effect on patients’ costs is unclear. And while President Joe Biden added requirements to make pricing information more user-friendly, Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House has raised questions about what’s next, even though posting prices is an area of rare bipartisan agreement. The uncertainty of what might happen next…