By MIKE MAGEE Question: What is the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug? Answer: Caffeine In the U.S., caffeine is consumed mainly in the form of coffee, tea, and cola. But coffee dominates. Worldwide, humans consume over 10 million tons of coffee beans a year. Roughly 16% (1.62 million tons) is devoured by Americans. The…
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…
Sue Sheridan’s baby boy, Cal, suffered brain damage from undetected jaundice in 1995. Helen Haskell’s 15-year-old son, Lewis, died after surgery in 2000 because weekend hospital staffers didn’t realize he was in shock. The episodes turned both women into advocates for patients and spurred research that made American health care safer. On April 1, the…
Tina Ewing-Wilson remembers the last time major Medicaid cuts slashed her budget. In the late 2000s, during the Great Recession, the pot of money she and other Medi-Cal recipients depend on to keep them out of costly residential care homes shrank. The only way she could afford help was to offer room and board to…
For years, White House press conferences included sign language interpreters for the deaf. No longer. Interpreters have been noticeably absent from Trump administration press briefings, advocacy groups say. Gone, too, are the American Sign Language interpretations that used to appear on the White House’s YouTube channel. A White House webpage on accessibility, whitehouse.gov/accessibility, has also…
From the Conversation with Tyler podcast with Sheilagh Ogilvie: [Ogilvie]: Historically, there was another reason, which was the medical guilds — the equivalent of the American Medical Association, only much, much worse, back in early modern Europe did not like the idea of this new thing, this new technology that they had not approved and that was…
It’s a holy grail of health care: forcing the industry to reveal prices negotiated between health plans and hospitals — information that had long been treated as a trade secret. And among the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump signed during his first five weeks back in office was a promise to “Make America…
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Purple flags, representing the nearly 300 Mecklenburg County residents who died of opioid overdose in 2023, fluttered in the humid breeze last August in recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day on the city’s predominantly Black west side. As recently as five years ago, the event might have attracted an overwhelmingly white crowd….
By VINCE KURAITIS, GIRISH MURALIDHARAN & JODY RANCK This entry is Section 2 of part 3 of 3 in the series Platforming Healthcare — The Long View. This essay is the next in the series entitled “Platforming Healthcare — the Long View”. The series presents a 30-Year Framework for Platforming Healthcare. An updated v2.0 of…