It was expected that the past year and a half would be a fraught time for Medicaid, the workhorse of the nation’s health system, which covers more people than any other government health insurance program. In April 2023, states resumed screening people for Medicaid eligibility and terminating coverage for those they said no longer qualified…
Vice President Kamala Harris is seeing a surge of support from Black women voters, galvanized in part by her work on health care issues such as maternal mortality, reproductive rights, and gun control. The enthusiasm may be key for Democratic turnout at the polls in critical battleground states. Black women have always been among the…
Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names. Clarifying the FDA’s Role and Authority Over Direct-to-Consumer Drug Ads While several inaccuracies in the recent opinion piece about direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements by KFF Health News’ Elisabeth Rosenthal have been…
Dave Lantz is no stranger to emergency department or doctor bills. With three kids in their teens and early 20s, “when someone gets sick or breaks an arm, all of a sudden you have thousand-dollar medical bills,” Lantz said. The family’s health plan that he used to get as the assistant director of physical plant…
In June 2019, Lija Greenseid handed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz an empty vial of insulin that her 13-year-old daughter had painted gold. Greenseid’s daughter has Type 1 diabetes, which means she requires daily injections of manufactured insulin to stay alive. The price of a single vial of insulin rose by about 1,200% between 1996 and…
SIKESTON, Mo. — At age 79, Nannetta Forrest, whose father, Cleo Wright, was lynched in Sikeston, Missouri, before she was born, wonders how the decades-long silence that surrounded his death in 1942 influenced her life. In 2020, Sikeston police killed another young Black man, 23-year-old Denzel Taylor. Taylor’s shooting death immediately made local headlines, but…
Boo! We scared you. Now it’s your turn to give our newsroom a scare. Submissions are now open for KFF Health News’ sixth annual Halloween haiku competition. KFF Health News has been publishing reader-submitted health care haikus for years and is on pins and needles to read how this spooky season inspires you. We want…
Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir-ritonavir) is effective at preventing hospitalization and death from COVID-19, but few people use it. A paper by SteelFisher et al. (2024) surveyed 1,430 American adults to find out why. Their survey revealed patients had a lack of awareness of the treatment as well as misinformation about the treatment (among those who were aware…
Federal officials resolved more than a decade ago to crack down on whopping government overpayments to private Medicare Advantage health insurance plans, which were siphoning off billions of tax dollars every year. But Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials have yet to demand any refunds — and over the years the private insurance plans…
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California voters are considering whether to roll back some of the criminal justice reforms enacted a decade ago as concerns about mass incarceration give way to public anger over property crime and a fentanyl crisis that has plagued the state since the covid-19 pandemic hit. Proposition 36, on the November ballot, would…