Health Care For Human

When April Roby-Bell joined the Gangster Disciples in middle school, the street gang treated her like family when she felt abandoned by her own. She was looking for love, acceptance, and stability.

“They trained us as little kids. How to own your ’hood, own your street: ‘This is my territory,’” Roby-Bell said.

The experience also taught her tough lessons about life and death at an early age. At least half of the friends she grew up with are now dead. “At times, it became hard because you just get tired of fighting,” she said. “I probably should have been dead a long time ago.”

At 42, Roby-Bell isn’t defending territory for a gang anymore. Instead, she is standing up for the families in the southern Illinois communities of East St. Louis and neighboring Washington Park who want their children to be able to go outside to play without

By Chaseedaw Giles

December 23, 2022

<br /> <span class="byline">Chaseedaw Giles</span>

Oldways Ambassadors Brenda Atchison and Glorya Fernandez walked a KHN reporter through two cooking demonstrations to showcase modern takes on cultural classics — like a cold black-eyed pea salad just in time for the new year, and a garlicky dill mojo sauce served over spinach salad.

Last year, Kelly LeBlanc, director of nutrition at Oldways, shared the organization’s heritage-based food guide pyramids with KHN for a report on USDA food guidelines. It’s the 10-year anniversary of Oldways’ A Taste of African Heritage nutrition curriculum, and this year, the curriculum became part of the Department of Agriculture’s SNAP-Ed Toolkit, a collection of interventions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program educational effort focused on helping low-income households make healthier food choices and reinforce healthy eating habits.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with

Despite growing evidence of the harm caused by medical debt, hundreds of U.S. hospitals maintain policies to aggressively pursue patients for unpaid bills, using tactics such as lawsuits, selling patient accounts to debt buyers, and reporting patients to credit rating agencies, a KHN investigation shows.

The collection practices are commonplace among all types of hospitals in all regions of the country, including public university systems, leading academic institutions, small community hospitals, for-profit chains, and nonprofit Catholic systems.

Individual hospital systems have come under scrutiny in recent years for suing patients. But the KHN analysis shows the practice is widespread, suggesting most of the nation’s approximately 5,100 hospitals serving the general public have policies to use legal action or other aggressive tactics against patients.

And although industry officials say they are careful about how they target patients for unpaid bills, few institutions have renounced what federal rules call

You’ve compared tuition. Reviewed on-campus housing costs. Even digested student meal plan prices.

But have you thought about how much your son’s or daughter’s dream school will charge for health coverage?

You might be in for a shock.

Hawley Montgomery-Downs was thrilled when daughter Bryn Tronco earned a scholarship that pays half the $63,000 annual tuition at the University of Southern California. But just as school was starting in August, she was stunned to receive a bill from USC for $3,000 to cover both a student health insurance premium and a fee that allows students to access on-campus clinics and other services. At home in West Virginia, she had paid nothing for her daughter’s health insurance, through the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, which serves lower- and middle-class families.

Montgomery-Downs, who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, was especially upset that USC not only billed her

Republican-led legislatures have repeatedly thwarted Medicaid expansion in a dozen conservative states, despite high numbers of uninsured residents. In recent years, supporters of expansion have found success with another strategy: letting voters decide.

Since 2017, Medicaid expansion has passed in seven states where the issue was put on the ballot, adopting the Affordable Care Act provision that would grant health insurance to hundreds of thousands living at or near the poverty line.

Last month, South Dakota voters adopted the program after bypassing the state’s conservative legislature. But any momentum from that November election victory was fleeting.

In Florida and Wyoming, the two remaining states where voters have the option, high costs and other hurdles baked into the ballot process render it almost impossible to enact a measure, advocates say.

“Each of those states, for different reasons, is particularly difficult to move a Medicaid expansion ballot