An elementary school teacher chose a low-price health insurance plan but soon realized she wasn’t clear about what it would mean for her family’s finances. “Once I got the insurance card, I compared our old plan to our new plan, and that’s when I really got worried, because I didn’t really understand what a deductible…
North America’s largest coke plant hugs the west bank of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River, belching out emissions from turning superheated coal into a carbon-rich fuel. Researchers say the children at Clairton Elementary School about a mile away pay the price. They discovered the students there and at other elementary schools near major pollution sites in Pennsylvania…
By MATTHEW HOLT This is a very brief review of Rock Health founder Halle Tecco’s Massively Better Healthcare. Halle is trying to do something quite complicated in this book. It’s really a three-part attempt to help somebody who is relatively new to health care entrepreneurship understand what the hell they are getting into. The first…
KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed Medicaid cuts on WAMU’s 1A on April 7. She also discussed health care affordability on The Middle With Jeremy Hobson on April 3. Click here to hear Rovner on 1A. Click here to hear Rovner on The Middle With Jeremy Hobson. KFF Health News is a…
About a year ago, I was stationed in downtown D.C. on an especially chilly spring day, watching hundreds of federal employees line up outside their office buildings. In a humbling exercise, employees were waiting to test whether their entry badges still worked at the Department of Health and Human Services — or whether they’d be walked back…
The accident happened in Pittsburgh on Nov. 16. Joseph Masterson, a lawyer who was just days from retiring at age 63, suffered cardiac arrest while driving, plowed into a guardrail, and lost consciousness. Other drivers stopped, broke the car window, and pulled him to safety. A passing volunteer firefighter performed CPR until an ambulance arrived…
This year, executives from nearly every major health insurance company made the same declaration in calls with Wall Street analysts: Using artificial intelligence to make coverage decisions would help save them money. Even the Trump administration is testing AI’s usefulness in managing the prior authorization process for the Medicare program, as well as seeking to…
By ANISH KOKA I was listening to a conversation between two critical thinkers I respect greatly: geneticist/technologist/blogger Razib Khan and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. Their discussion was a freewheeling rant about the problems they see with the rise of populism on the left and right, but a throwaway comment related to the US physician shortage in the…
That is the title of a new paper published this week in Clinical Nutrition with co-authors Kyi-Sin Than, Khounish Sharma, Kirk W. Kerr, and Dhanasekhar Kesavelu. The abstract is below: IntroductionPediatric malnutrition is a significant global public health challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This study quantifies the lifetime, per-person economic impact of pediatric…
By MATTHEW HOLT I know you all care, so I am giving a 7th update on the telenovela about my Labcorp bill for $34.95. The very TL:DR summary of where we are so far is that in May 2025 I had a lab test to go with the free preventative visit that the ACA guarantees, but I…