As immigration authorities carry out what President Donald Trump has promised will be the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, several states are passing laws to keep children out of foster care when their detained parents have no family or friends available to take temporary custody of them. The federal government doesn’t track how…
New Orleans plans to revamp the commission that oversees city parks and playgrounds and is seeking $5 million in federal aid after an investigation published by Verite News and KFF Health News found high levels of lead contamination in playgrounds throughout the city. Mayor Helena Moreno signed an executive order on April 7 that creates…
Cody Simmons is the CEO of DermaSensor. I met him when he won the Digital Health Hub Foundation award for diagnostic tools last year. DermaSensor is a device designed to detect early skin cancer using Spectroscopy. Right now only 8% of those with potential skin cancer get the recommended screening. It’s another area where technology…
Proportion of days covered (PDC) is the most widely endorsed measure of medication adherence. For instance, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) uses PDC as its preferred adherence measure for its Quality Rating System for many chronic conditions (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia). However, your PDC measure may be flawed depending on what…
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…