Rural Emergency Hospitals (REHs) are a new Medicare provider type created to preserve essential emergency and outpatient access in rural communities where low inpatient volume makes full-service hospitals financially unsustainable. They receive enhanced outpatient payments and a fixed monthly facility payment in exchange for forgoing acute inpatient care. CMS has an REH fact sheet that…
ALEXANDER, N.C. — Aubreigh Osborne has a new best friend. Dressed in blue with a big ribbon in her blond curls, the 3-year-old sat in her mother’s lap carefully enunciating a classmate’s first name after hearing the words “best friend.” Just months ago, Gaile Osborne didn’t expect her adoptive daughter would make friends at school….
A Texas boy’s second dose of the MMRV vaccine cost over $1,400. A Pennsylvania woman’s long-acting birth control cost more than $14,000. Treatment for a Florida Medicaid enrollee’s heart attack cost nearly $78,000 — about as much as surgery for an uninsured Montana woman’s broken arm. In 2025, these patients were among the hundreds who…
An Arm and a Leg host Dan Weissmann breaks down how two states passed laws aimed at protecting people from things like medical debt, insurance delays and denials, and corporate profiteering. In Maine, lawmakers unanimously voted to remove medical debts from credit reports. While a nationwide court ruling has cast doubt on the new law’s…
Lisa Farris worried that a nasty infection from recent liposuction and a tummy tuck was rapidly getting worse. So she phoned the cosmetic surgery center to ask if she should head to the emergency room, she alleges in a lawsuit. The nurse who took the call at the Sono Bello center in Addison, Texas, told…
By MIKE MAGEE The Ghost of Christmas Past, in the form of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, has returned this season to torture one RFK Jr who refuses to fully share life saving vaccines with children. In the encounter, the ghostly Koop reviews a time 37 years ago when citizens came together to celebrate separating…
That is the title of a helpful article by Karnon and Haji Ali Afzali (Pharmacoeconomics 2014) with a subtitle A Review and Critique of the Costs and Benefits of DES. The paper starts by highlighting the 3 most common types of models: decision trees, Markovian cohort models, and individual level models. Decisions trees are useful…
BALTIMORE — David Fitzgerald knows how tough it is to prevent gun violence. In 15 years working in some of Baltimore’s deadliest neighborhoods for a program called Safe Streets, he said, he’s defused hundreds of fights that could have led to a shooting. The effort, part of Baltimore’s more than $100 million gun violence prevention…
ORANGE, Calif. — Carmen Basu, bundled in a red jacket and woolly scarf, stood outside the headquarters of her local health plan one morning after picking up free groceries. She had brought her husband, teenage son, and 79-year-old mother-in-law to help. They grabbed canned food, fruit and vegetables, and a grocery store gift card. And…
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Tyeesha Ferguson fears her 28-year-old son will kill or be killed. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” said Ferguson, who still calls Quincy Jackson III her baby. She remembers a boy who dressed himself in three-piece suits, donated his allowance, and graduated high school at 16 with an academic scholarship and plans…