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Doctors, patients, and hospitals have railed for years about the prior authorization processes that health insurers use to decide whether they’ll pay for patients’ drugs or medical procedures. The Biden administration announced a crackdown in January, but some state lawmakers are looking to go further.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion and many states banned the procedure, reproductive health care organizations hired dozens of people to help patients arrange travel and pay for care.
The designers of the Affordable Care Act might have assumed that they spelled out with sufficient clarity that millions of Americans would no longer have to pay for certain types of preventive care. But they didn’t reckon with America’s ever-creative medical billing juggernaut.
California’s governor vetoed a bill extending insurance coverage for kids with hearing loss, but most states now require it.
Alex Azar advanced Canadian drug importation as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. Now he chairs the board of a company managing Florida’s importation program.
Even in states where laws protect minors’ access to gender-affirming care, malpractice insurance premiums are keeping small and independent clinics from treating patients.
Adults who develop one autoimmune form of diabetes are often misdiagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Those wrong diagnoses make it harder to get the appropriate medications and technology to manage their blood sugar. Many Black patients wonder if their race plays a role.
Only a few states have rules to protect workers from the growing threat of extreme heat, either indoors or outdoors. California is expected to adopt heat standards for indoor workers in spring, even as federal legislation has stalled.
Delaying cancer treatment can be deadly — which makes the roadblock-riddled process that health insurers use to approve or deny care particularly daunting for oncology patients.
Cost estimates balloon and complications mount as the Defense Department grapples with PFAS pollution at hundreds of its bases and surrounding communities.
The HeartMate 3 is considered the safest mechanical heart pump of its kind, but a federal database contains more than 4,500 reports in which the medical device may have caused or contributed to a patient’s death.
As opioid settlement dollars land in government coffers, a swarm of businesses are positioning themselves to profit from the windfall. But will their potential gains come at the expense of the settlements’ intended purpose — to remediate the effects of the opioid epidemic?
Thousands of people shared their experiences and related to the financial drain on families portrayed in the “Dying Broke” series, a joint project by ýҕl Health News and The New York Times that examined the costs of long-term care.
Being Black has always been dangerous for pregnant women and infants in the South. And researchers say things are continuing to move in the wrong direction.
Peer-to-peer efforts can meet a clear need among students whose colleges may not make sexual health products accessible or affordable.
A rural South Dakota medic said using an ambulance video system to communicate with a doctor gave him peace of mind as he treated a patient who was seriously injured when gored by a bison.
Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, says a recent lawsuit is meant to chill the consolidation of medical groups that results in higher prices for consumers. But it may be too late to curb price hikes.
New research finds that private wells near more than 82% of select military sites were contaminated with PFAS chemicals.
Despite the prevalence of autoimmune conditions, like the thyroid disease Hashimoto’s, sometimes finding help can prove frustrating as well as expensive. There are often no definitive diagnostic tests, so patients may rack up big bills as they search for confirmation of their condition and for treatment options.
ýҕl Health News editor-at-large for public health Céline Gounder discusses how families of transgender youth are uprooting their lives due to anti-trans policies and their ripple effects.
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