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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.
KHN and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
Massachusetts is the latest state to settle with St. Louis-based Centene Corp. over allegations that it overcharged Medicaid prescription drug programs.
Two Missouri towns are without operating hospitals after private equity-backed Noble Health left both facilities mired in debt, lawsuits, and federal investigations. The hospitals’ new operator, Platinum Health, agreed to buy them in April for $2 and laid off the last employees in early September.
Texas is at least the 12th state to settle with St. Louis-based Centene Corp. over allegations that it overcharged Medicaid prescription drug programs.
As private equity groups are swarming into aging America’s eye care, the consolidation is costing the U.S. health care system and patients more money.
California and New York would be the first states to require anyone under 18 to obtain prescriptions to purchase over-the-counter weight loss products, which some research has linked to eating disorders.
For decades, the U.S. medical establishment has adhered to a legally recognized standard for brain death, one embraced by most states. Why is a uniform clinical standard for the inception of human life proving so elusive?
The U.S. Labor Department investigates Noble Health after former employees of its shuttered Missouri hospitals say the private equity-backed owner took money from their paychecks and then failed to fund their insurance coverage.
People whose brains have been injured by concussions, traumatic accidents, strokes, or neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease can benefit from targeted therapy. Experts also employ therapies for long-covid patients with memory and language problems.
Sexual health clinics are scrambling to properly track, test, and treat hundreds of monkeypox patients. So far, it isn’t going well.
Spurred on by opposition to pandemic-related health mandates, a coalition of religious liberty groups, conservative think tanks, and Republican state attorneys general has filed a cascade of litigation seeking to rein in the powers of public health authorities.
About 930,000 abortions occurred in the U.S. in 2020, an 8% increase from 2017. But that nationwide figure belies dramatic variation among states — disparities expected to magnify in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade.
By undoing that landmark decision, the law of the land since 1973, the court has empowered states to set their own abortion restrictions — so where people live will determine their level of access.
Noble Health swept into two small Missouri towns promising to save their hospitals. Instead, workers and vendors say it stopped paying bills and government inspectors found it put patients at risk. Within two years — after taking millions in federal covid relief and big administrative fees — it locked the doors.
Physicians have long believed it’s good medicine to consider race in health care. But recently, rather than perpetuate the myth that race governs how bodies function, a more nuanced approach has emerged: acknowledging that racial health disparities often reflect the effects of generations of systemic racism, such as lack of access to stable housing or nutritious food.
Mourners are wrapping caskets in imagery, similar to the way companies wrap logos around cars, trucks, and buses. Across the country, casket-wrap companies create custom designs, too often for grieving parents who have lost their children to gun violence.
A year ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded states and local health departments $2.25 billion to help people of color and other populations at higher risk from covid. But a KHN review shows public health agencies across the country have been slow to spend it.
Covid cases are again climbing, but you wouldn’t know it from the behavior of public health and elected officials, much less the general public, all of whom seem to want to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, the fallout over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on abortion continues even as the Senate fails — again — to muster the votes to write abortion rights into law. Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, and Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
Travel nurse contracts that were plentiful and paid the temporary nurses far more than hospital staff nurses are vanishing. Hospitals nationwide are turning their energies to recruiting full-time people.
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