Author: Hill Castle
Los republicanos insisten en que los recortes del presidente Donald Trump a Medicaid buscaban reducir el fraude y poner a trabajar a más adultos beneficiarios del programa. Pero los efectos secundarios pueden incluir menos atención médica para niños enfermos. Algunos hospitales infantiles podrían perder miles de millones de dólares en ingresos una vez que se aplique por completo la amplia ley fiscal y de gasto de Trump, conocida por los republicanos como la One Big Beautiful Bill, según la Asociación de Hospitales Infantiles. Los niños representan casi la mitad de los inscritos en Medicaid —el programa estatal y federal de…
Durante un tiempo, pasear al perro se volvió peligroso. Earl Vickers solía sacar a Molly, su perra mezcla de pastor alemán, bóxer y algo más, a caminar por la playa o por su vecindario en Seaside, California. Sin embargo, hace algunos años comenzó a tener problemas para mantenerse en pie. “Cada vez que otro perro venía hacia nosotros, terminaba en el suelo”, recordó Vickers, de 69 años, ingeniero electrónico jubilado. “Parecía que me caía cada dos meses. Era una locura”. La mayoría de esas caídas no le causaron daños graves, aunque una vez se cayó de espaldas y se golpeó…
When Judith Miller had routine blood work done in July, she got a phone alert the same day that her lab results were posted online. So, when her doctor messaged her the next day that her overall tests were fine, Miller wrote back to ask about the elevated carbon dioxide and low anion gap listed in the report. While the 76-year-old Milwaukee resident waited to hear back, Miller did something patients increasingly do when they can’t reach their health care team. She put her test results into Claude and asked the AI assistant to evaluate the data. “Claude helped give…
Paula Span For a while, walking the dog felt hazardous. Earl Vickers was accustomed to taking Molly, his shepherd-boxer-something-else mix, for strolls on the beach or around his neighborhood in Seaside, California. A few years ago, though, he started to experience problems staying upright. “If another dog came toward us, every single time I’d end up on the ground,” recalled Vickers, 69, a retired electrical engineer. “It seemed like I was falling every other month. It was kind of crazy.” Most of those tumbles did no serious damage, though one time he fell backward and hit his head on a wall behind…
Devon Price, a 15-year-old boy with autism, has attended the largest school district in North Carolina for 10 years, but he cannot read or write. His twin sister, Danielle, who is also autistic, was bullied by classmates and became suicidal. Under federal law, public schools must provide children with disabilities a “free appropriate public education,” to give them the same opportunity to learn as other kids. The twins’ mother, Emma Miller, and tens of thousands of other parents in the U.S. have elevated complaints to the Education Department alleging that schools and states have ignored mistreatment of their children. Those…
KFF Health News correspondent Rachana Pradhan discussed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new “Make America Healthy Again” strategy for children’s health on CBS News’ “CBS Morning News” on Sept. 10. Click here to watch Pradhan on “CBS Morning News.” KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed Kennedy’s pseudoscientific approach to running HHS on WAMU’s “1A” on Sept. 8. Click here to hear Rovner on “1A.” KFF Health News South Dakota correspondent Arielle Zionts discussed collaborative rural hospital networks on Apple News’ “Apple News Today” podcast on Sept. 9. Click here to hear Zionts on…
BOWMAN, N.D. — Independent rural hospitals are increasingly forming collaborative groups to share resources and combine bargaining power with the goal of saving money and improving patient care. The networks, which have cropped up in several states in recent years, offer small-town hospitals an alternative to selling to large hospital systems and forfeiting local autonomy. “We found that we could both have the power of negotiation as a larger entity but also be able to negotiate lower costs for services and equipment,” said Dennis Goebel, CEO of Southwest Healthcare Services, a Bowman hospital that is part of the 22-member Rough…
ST. LOUIS — Lying on top of an operating room table with his chest exposed, Larry Black Jr. was moments away from having his organs harvested when a doctor ran breathlessly into the room. “Get him off the table,” the doctor recalled telling the surgical team at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital as the team cleaned Black’s chest and abdomen. “This is my patient. Get him off the table.” At first, no one recognized Zohny Zohny in his surgical mask. Then he told the surgical team he was the neurosurgeon assigned to Black’s case. Stunned by his orders, the…
New moms all over social media are breaking down their incredibly expensive hospital bills after giving birth. So why is giving birth so pricey in the U.S.? And given the Trump administration’s anti-abortion, pro-natalist policies, is anything on the table to make having a child more affordable? KFF Health News video producer Hannah Norman spoke with Stephanie Hastings, a physician and an assistant program director at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and Malini Nijagal, an OB-GYN and a clinical professor at the University of California-San Francisco. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and…
FDA leaders under President Donald Trump are moving to abandon a decades-old policy of asking outside experts to review drug applications, a move critics say would shield the agency’s decisions from public scrutiny. The agency “would like to get away” from assembling panels of experts to examine and vote on individual drugs, because “I don’t think they’re needed,” said George Tidmarsh, head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. He relayed the message Tuesday at a meeting of health care product makers and Wednesday to an FDA advocacy group. In addition to being redundant, Tidmarsh said, advisory meetings…
The Host Oct. 1 is the start of the next fiscal year, and unless Congress reaches agreement on continued spending, big parts of the government could shut down that day. Democrats, whose votes will be needed in the Senate, would like Republicans to extend the Biden-era extra tax credits for Affordable Care Act insurance plans as part of a compromise, but so far Republicans don’t seem willing. Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released his much-anticipated “Make America Healthy Again” blueprint to improve children’s health, but the report contained few specifics on how his goals would…
HELENA, Mont. — In 2023, a group of 16 young Montanans won a much-heralded climate change case that said the state had deprived them of a “clean and healthful environment,” a right enshrined in Montana’s constitution. Their victory in Held v. Montana, later upheld by the state Supreme Court, resounded across the country, showing that young people have a stake in the issue of climate change, advocates say. Yet, state policies to address the causes of climate change in Montana — home to large coal, oil, and natural gas deposits — haven’t changed in the wake of the case. On…
Critics of affirmative action have launched a long-shot appeal aimed at stopping California from requiring training on unconscious bias in every continuing medical education class. A July ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld California’s right to mandate that every course doctors take to remain licensed must address how bias contributes to poorer health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities. The ruling against the nonprofit Do No Harm and Los Angeles ophthalmologist Azadeh Khatibi amounts to a victory for California as it fights the Trump administration and right-leaning advocacy and legal groups’ attacks…
Government documents viewed by KFF Health News show a drop in patients receiving care this year at the National Institutes of Health’s renowned research hospital, a 200-bed facility at NIH headquarters in Maryland. We previously reported a decrease in the number of patients being treated at the NIH Clinical Center from February through April. Since then, we’ve obtained newer data showing the drop has continued. As of mid-August, the average daily number of patients treated at the hospital was around 60. There has been a steady drop since February, coinciding with the Trump administration’s mass firings of government employees, its broad…
Los pacientes comienzan a hacer fila antes del amanecer en Operación Salud Fronteriza, una clínica de salud gratuita que se realiza cada año durante cinco días en el Valle del Río Grande de Texas. Muchos residentes de esta región predominantemente latina, ubicada en la frontera con México, no tienen seguro médico, por lo que esta feria de salud ha sido durante más de 25 años un recurso clave de atención médica gratuita en el sur de Texas. Hasta este año. El plan de la administración Trump de retirar más de $550 millones en fondos federales para salud pública y pandemias…
Republicans insist that President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid were aimed at reducing fraud and getting more of its adult beneficiaries into jobs. But the side effects may include less care for sick kids. Some children’s hospitals collectively stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue once Trump’s wide-ranging tax and spending law, which Republicans called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” is fully enacted, according to the Children’s Hospital Association. Kids account for nearly half of enrollees in Medicaid, the state and federally financed health program for low-income and disabled people, and its related Children’s Health Insurance Program. The law…
Blake Farmer, Nashville Public Radio Any evidence of lice was once a reason for immediate dismissal from school, not to return until the student’s head was lice-free. But what are known as “no-nit” policies have been dropped in favor of “nonexclusion” rules, prioritizing class time over any nuisance caused by parasites the size of sesame seeds. That leniency, of late, is coming back to bite some schools. Parents in Massachusetts, Texas, Ohio, and Georgia are petitioning for their districts to revive strict rules on nits and live lice. They blame recent outbreaks on the inclusive recommendations from the Centers for…
Grace Abels, PolitiFact and Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact “Everybody can get” the covid-19 vaccine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sept. 4 in a Senate Finance Committee hearing When health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Sept. 4, several senators criticized him for restricting the covid-19 shots after promising in November he wouldn’t “take away anybody’s vaccines.” “Did you hold up a big sign saying that you were lying when you said that?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Kennedy. On Aug. 27, the FDA updated its covid vaccine guidance, limiting the groups of people approved…
BOWMAN, N.D. — Retta Jacobi stepped onto a metal platform that lifted her to an entrance on the side of a custom-designed semitrailer. Once inside, she lay down on a platform that technicians slid into an MRI machine. Jacobi hoped the scan would help pinpoint the source of the pain in her shoulders. The mobile MRI unit visits Southwest Healthcare Services, the hospital in Bowman, North Dakota, each Wednesday. Without it, the community’s 1,400 residents would have to drive 40 minutes to get to an MRI machine, an expensive piece of medical equipment the hospital couldn’t afford on its own.…
In 2024, the Texas State Guard participated in Operation Border Health, a five-day free health clinic in Texas. The annual event was canceled this year after the Trump administration announced a plan to strip more than $550 million in federal public health and pandemic emergency funds from Texas. (Texas State Guard/CC BY-ND 2.0) Patients begin lining up before dawn at Operation Border Health, an annual five-day health clinic in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Many residents in this predominantly Latino and Hispanic region spanning the Mexican border lack insurance, making the health fair a major source of free medical care in…
Taylor Sisk En los últimos años, en la capital de Michigan y sus alrededores, Rebecca Kasen ha visto y oído cosas que nunca habría imaginado. “Estamos viviendo un momento muy extraño”, reflexionó Kasen, directora ejecutiva del Women’s Center of Greater Lansing. Una madrugada de noviembre, una cámara de vigilancia del Women’s Center captó a un grupo de personas burlándose de un cartel en una ventana y que decía “Black Lives Matter”. Uno de esos individuos incluso vandalizó la despensa comunitaria gratuita. Ese mismo otoño, el personal de la institución informó que había sido acosado. A pocas cuadras de allí, sobre…
Cada año, durante nuestras vacaciones familiares en Cape Cod, disfrutamos de todos los placeres clásicos del verano: escalar dunas, caminar por la playa, observar focas, comer ostras y leer los libros que nos habíamos propuesto durante todo el año. También hacer compras. Mi nieto quería unos juguetes pequeños. Mi hija aprovechó para llevarse varios rompecabezas de mil piezas de la tienda de juegos de Provincetown. Yo compré aros y un par de libros. Y un espacio en un cementerio. Una tumba. Está cerca de un grupo de robles, en un cementerio de Wellfleet, Massachusetts, donde algunas lápidas cubiertas de musgo,…