Category: Health Articles

Aneri Pattani and Rae Ellen Bichell

Tim Buck knows by heart how many people died from drug overdoses in his North Carolina county last year: 10. The year before it was 12 — an all-time high.

Those losses reverberate deeply in rural Pamlico County, a tightknit community of 12,000 on the state’s eastern shore. Over the past decade, it’s had the highest rate of opioid overdose deaths in North Carolina.

“Most folks know these individuals or know somebody who knows them,” said Buck, the county manager and a lifelong resident, who will proudly tell anyone that four generations of his family have called the area home. “We all feel it and we hate it when our folks hurt.”

Now, the county is receiving money from national settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors to address the crisis. But by the time those billions of dollars are divided among states and localities,

KHN senior correspondent Angela Hart appeared on Spectrum News 1’s “Los Angeles Times Today” on Nov. 29 to discuss her reporting on California’s pricey and ambitious experiment to transform its Medicaid program, called Medi-Cal.

The initiative, known as CalAIM, will provide some of Medi-Cal’s sickest and costliest patients with social services such as home-delivered healthy meals, help with housing move-in costs, and home repairs to make living environments safer for people with asthma.

But, as Hart noted, the reforms leave many patients behind. Hart spent time at MLK Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, where patients, health consumer advocates, and hospital executives told her that care hasn’t improved for the majority of patients, who don’t receive the new social services. They also told her that low reimbursement rates for doctors and other providers have created a “separate and unequal” system of care in a community

ATLANTA — Earlier this year, top leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began a monumental task: turning the sprawling, labyrinthine organization known for its highly specialized, academically focused scientific research into a sleek, flexible public health response agency primed to serve the American public. It’s an attempt to keep the CDC from repeating the mistakes it made while responding to covid-19.

But agency veterans, outside public health officials, and workplace organization experts said the current workplace structure could be a major barrier to that goal. Like directors before her, agency head Dr. Rochelle Walensky spends a considerable amount of time away from the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta. The agency has also embraced a workplace flexibility program that has allowed most of its scientists to stay remote.

As of October, 10,020 of the CDC’s 12,892 full-time employees — 78% of the full-time workforce — were allowed to work

Darius Tahir

Heather Meador y Anna Herber-Downey usan aplicaciones de citas en el trabajo, y su jefe lo sabe.

Ambas son enfermeras de salud pública en el Departamento de Salud Pública del condado de Linn, en el este de Iowa. Aprendieron que estas apps son la forma más eficiente de informar a los usuarios que algunas de las personas que conocieron en estos sitios pueden haberlos expuesto a infecciones de transmisión sexual (ITS).

Un surgimiento a nivel nacional de las ITS, con un aumento del 10% y 7% respectivamente en casos informados de gonorrea y sífilis, de 2019 a 2020, según los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC), está siendo implacable con Iowa. El dúo descubrió que la llamada telefónica, un método tradicional de rastreo de contactos, ya no funciona bien.

“Cuando comencé hace 12 años, llamábamos a todos”, dijo Meador, supervisora de la rama

December 2, 2022

KHN senior correspondent Angela Hart joined the nonpartisan group Democracy Winters on Nov. 19 to discuss the politics of health care in California. She focused on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s major health care initiatives, including a transformation of the state Medicaid program that will bring nontraditional, social services to some enrollees — with a focus on homeless patients.

She also discussed Newsom’s plan for California to produce generic insulin under the CalRx label and sell it at a lower cost than is currently available. And she described Newsom’s on-again, off-again relationship with the politically volatile issue of single-payer health care.  

Read Hart’s coverage of those issues here.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit

Lauren Weber and Hannah Recht

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A Missouri man who is deaf and blind said a medical bill he didn’t know existed was sent to debt collections, triggering an 11% rise in his home insurance premiums.

An insurer has suspended a blind woman’s coverage every year since 2010 after mailing printed “verification of benefits” forms to her California home that she cannot read, she said. The issues continued even after she got a lawyer involved.

And another insurer kept sending a visually impaired Indiana woman bills she said she could not read, even after her complaint to the Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights led to corrective actions.

Health insurers and health care systems across the U.S. are breaking disability rights laws by sending inaccessible medical bills and notices, a KHN investigation found. The practice

Renuka Rayasam and Fred Clasen-Kelly

ATLANTA — When Louana Joseph’s son had a seizure because of an upper respiratory infection in July, she abandoned the apartment her family had called home for nearly three years.

She suspected the gray and brown splotches spreading through the apartment were mold and had caused her son’s illness. Mold can trigger and exacerbate lung diseases such as asthma and has been linked to upper respiratory tract conditions.

But leaving the two-bedroom Atlanta apartment meant giving up a home that rented for less than $1,000 a month, a price that is increasingly hard to find even in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods.

“I am looking everywhere,” said Joseph, who is 33. “Right now, I can’t afford it.”

Since then, Joseph, her 3-year-old son, and her infant daughter have teetered on the edge of homelessness. They have shuffled between sleeping in an extended-stay motel and staying with

When Jerry Bilinski, a 67-year-old retired social worker, scheduled cataract surgery with Carolina Eye Associates near his home in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he expected no drama, just a future with better vision.

Cataract procedures are among the most common surgeries in the U.S. — nearly 4 million take place annually — and generally take about 30 minutes under light sedation. At the same time, the surgeon scheduled the placement of a little stent inside Bilinski’s eye to relieve pressure from his diabetes-related glaucoma, also a routine procedure to preserve his eyesight.

Bilinski recalled being sedated during the surgery in May and hearing a nurse anesthetist ask him whether he felt any pain. Bilinski said no — only some pressure on the right side of his head. He said the nurse anesthetist responded that he would increase the sedation. Despite being under anesthesia, Bilinski knew something was wrong.

“The next thing

Christina Saint Louis

NELSONVILLE, Ohio — The Mary Hill Youth and Family Center’s building has long been at a crossroads overlooking this rural Appalachian city, but its purpose has evolved.

For 65 years, residents of Nelsonville and the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio traveled to the hilltop hospital seeking care. Then, in 2014, the 15-bed hospital, which was often without patients, closed.

Later, the three-story brick building reopened as a hub for health services. With the help of several funding sources, Integrated Services for Behavioral Health, a nonprofit social service agency, transformed the building into a site for mental health treatment, primary and dental care, and food pantry access.

In June, the organization opened a 16-bed residential mental health treatment program on the former hospital’s top floor. The program serves children in rural southeastern Ohio and gives families an option besides sending their kids far away — sometimes out of