Category: Health Articles

Phillip Reese

Even as pandemic lockdowns fade into memory, covid-19 has transformed California’s workplace culture in ways researchers say will reverberate well beyond 2022.

According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, working from home for some portion of the week has become the new normal for a large segment of Californians. The data shows high-income employees with college degrees are more likely to have access to this hybrid work model, while lower-income employees stay the course with on-site responsibilities and daily commutes.

At a basic level, that means low-wage workers will continue to shoulder greater risks of infection and serious illness as new covid variants sweep through job sites, alongside seasonal waves of flu and other respiratory viruses. Multiple studies have found that covid took its greatest toll in low-income neighborhoods, whose workers were deemed essential during early pandemic lockdowns — the farmworkers, grocery clerks, warehouse packers, and

Dan Weissmann

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As Americans choose their insurance plans for next year, some might wonder: How does the recent rise in state abortion restrictions affect insurance plans?

There’s no single answer, but for a lot of people, insurance has rarely helped pay for abortions. Most pay cash, and many can’t afford it.

That’s where abortion funds come in. These organizations have been providing financial and logistical assistance to people seeking abortion care for decades.

The “An Arm and a Leg” podcast spoke with Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Tyler Barbarin, a board member with the New Orleans Abortion Fund, to understand the history behind these services and how they’re operating in a post-Roe v. Wade environment.

“An Arm and a Leg” is a co-production

This spring, Chevron workers testified that the company revoked health coverage for hundreds of members of the United Steelworkers Local 5 at the Richmond, California, refinery during a strike that ultimately lasted two months. Thousands of nurses at Stanford Health Care were told in April they would lose their health insurance if they did not return to work during their weeklong strike. More than 300 workers at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City received a similar message after going on strike in mid-July as contract negotiations stalled.

Freezing health insurance benefits is a common tactic in a labor dispute because without them, workers might be more easily persuaded to concede to management’s demands. But California lawmakers are giving an edge to strikers.

Assembly member Jim Wood, a Democrat, is hoping a new California law he authored will dissuade employers from cutting off health benefits during labor disputes by allowing private-industry workers

[UPDATED at 2 p.m. ET]

Georgia is set to become the only state to have work requirements for Medicaid coverage.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s reelection — and a surprising Biden administration decision not to appeal a federal court ruling — have freed the state to introduce its plan that would allow for a limited increase in the pool of low-income residents eligible for Medicaid.

Questions remain about the rollout of Kemp’s plan. But it would set up Georgia as a test case for a work provision that has been proposed by several states and struck down in federal courts and by the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups are concerned about barriers to obtaining and maintaining the coverage. They also point out that the Kemp plan would be more expensive per enrollee and cover a fraction of the people who would get Medicaid under a full expansion. The new Georgia eligibility

The documentary “InHospitable” explores the role hospitals play in a fractured U.S. health care system and how they have driven up costs. It presents stories of patients and activists who protested practices at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a behemoth health system headquartered in Pittsburgh. They asserted that UPMC was making vital care unaffordable and sometimes unattainable for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable patients as it fought a business dispute with a rival health system.

(Spoiler alert: The dispute was finally resolved, and care restored, due to a settlement negotiated by Pennsylvania’s then-attorney general, Josh Shapiro, who is now the governor-elect.)

A recent conversation on Facebook about the film was moderated by KHN chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner and featured the film’s director, Sandra Alvarez; Elisabeth Rosenthal, KHN’s editor-in-chief; and patient Beth McCracken. Both Rosenthal and McCracken were featured in the film.

The participants discussed how some nonprofit

As covid-19 raged, roughly 4,000 highly skilled epidemiologists, communication specialists, and public health nurses were hired by a nonprofit tied to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to plug the holes at battered public health departments on the front lines.

But over the past few months, the majority of the CDC Foundation’s contracts for those public health workers at local and state departments have ended as the group has spent nearly all of its almost $289 million in covid relief funding. The CDC Foundation, an independent nonprofit that supports the CDC’s work, anticipates that no more than about 800 of its 4,000 hires will ultimately staff those jurisdictions, spokesperson Pierce Nelson said.

That has left many local and state health departments facing staffing shortages as the nation eyes a possible winter uptick in covid cases and grapples with the ongoing threat of monkeypox, exploding caseloads of sexually transmitted infections,

Markian Hawryluk

State employees in Colorado are being asked to be better consumers when shopping for health care services. And if they choose lower-cost and higher-quality providers, they could get a check in the mail for a portion of the savings.

It’s part of an initiative known as the Colorado Purchasing Alliance, through which employers in the state are banding together to negotiate lower prices for health care services. The state government is one of 12 employers that have agreed to join the alliance and will be the first to use the newly negotiated rates and consumer incentives.

The goal is to disrupt what’s considered a dysfunctional market for health care by encouraging employers and employees to make better choices and forcing health systems in the state — which have some of the highest prices and profits in the country — to cut their rates.

Since July 1, state employees

For 23 years, the private ambulance industry in California had gone without an increase in the base rate the state pays it to transport Medicaid enrollees. At the start of the year, it asked the state legislature to more than triple the rate, from around $110 to $350 per ride. The request went unheeded.

In September, American Medical Response, the largest U.S. provider of ambulance services, announced it had “made the difficult decision” to end nonemergency transports in Los Angeles County and blamed the state for having one of the lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the country. “What’s more,” the company, which sold for $2.4 billion in 2017 to private equity firm KKR, said, “we are not subsidized by taxpayer funds like public agencies, and almost 80% of our patients pay nothing or below cost for our services.”

The company, which also cited high operational costs, said

Michelle Andrews

Casi tres años después de que la pandemia de covid-19 alterara para siempre los lugares de trabajo, la cobertura de salud mental sigue siendo una prioridad para los empleadores, según la encuesta anual realizada por KFF.

Casi la mitad de los grandes empleadores encuestados, con al menos 200 trabajadores, informaron que una proporción cada vez mayor de sus empleados utilizaba servicios de salud mental. Sin embargo, casi un tercio de ese grupo dijo que la red de su plan médico no tenía suficientes proveedores en esta área, como para que los empleados tuvieran acceso oportuno a la atención que necesitaban.

A medida que millones de empleados cambiaban las oficinas cerradas por sus casas, o se arriesgaban a infectarse trabajando en frentes de batalla contra covid, los problemas de salud mental se dispararon.

Ahora, aunque muchos lugares de trabajo han vuelto a una apariencia de “normalidad”, algunos trabajadores todavía

As the covid-19 pandemic worsened a mental health crisis among America’s young people, a small group of states quietly withdrew from the nation’s largest public effort to track concerning behaviors in high school students.

Colorado, Florida, and Idaho will not participate in a key part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys that reaches more than 80,000 students. Over the past 30 years, the state-level surveys, conducted anonymously during each odd-numbered year, have helped elucidate the mental health stressors and safety risks for high school students.

Each state has its own rationale for opting out, but their withdrawal — when suicides and feelings of hopelessness are up — has caught the attention of school psychologists and federal and state health officials.

Some questions on the state-level surveys — which can also ask students about their sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual activity, and drug use