Category: Health

Céline Gounder, KHN’s editor-at-large for public health, discusses new data showing an excess of deaths in 2020 related to heart disease. The deaths — from heart attack and heart failure — show that the virus can affect the heart and that cardiac problems can show up months after an initial covid-19 infection has apparently resolved. […]

After the nursing home where Leann Sample worked was bought by private investors, it started falling apart. Literally. Part of a ceiling collapsed on a nurse, the air conditioning conked out regularly, and a toilet once burst on Sample while she was helping a resident in the bathroom, she recalled in a court deposition. “It’s […]

Dan Weissmann The “An Arm and a Leg” podcast is back. This season, host Dan Weissmann will tell stories about patients finding creative ways to fight back against outrageous bills.  This first episode of Season 9 updates a story from 2019 about a listener who got a $35 bill from a medical testing lab she […]

Renuka Rayasam and Blake Farmer, Nashville Public Radio Near the end of his scheduled three-month stay at a rehab center outside Austin, Texas, Daniel McKegney was forced to tell his father in North Carolina that he needed more time and more money, he recently recalled. His father had already received bills from BRC Recovery totaling […]

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When the covid-19 pandemic hit, Dr. Corey Siegel was more prepared than most of his peers. Half of Siegel’s patients — many with private insurance and Medicaid — were already using telehealth, logging onto appointments through phones or computers. “You get to meet their family members; you get to meet their pets,” Siegel said. “You […]

Mother-to-be Kathleen Founds made a routine doctor’s appointment to discuss the risks of antidepressants in pregnancy. After the visit, Founds, who relies on medication to quell the manic highs and despondent lows of bipolar disorder, learned the physician was out of network. She received a surprise bill for $650, launching her into a maze of […]

Medicare Advantage plans for seniors dodged a major financial bullet Monday as government officials gave them a reprieve for returning hundreds of millions of dollars or more in government overpayments — some dating back a decade or more. The health insurance industry had long feared the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would demand repayment […]

Brenna Kearney was seven months pregnant in December 2019 when she experienced what she thought were bad flu symptoms. Her husband, Casey Trumble, drove her from their Chicago home to her OB-GYN’s office at Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital downtown. With suddenly elevated blood pressure and protein in her urine, she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, […]

MILLSTADT, Ill. — It was a late Friday afternoon when a team of men approached a tiny pink casket. One wiped his brow. Another stepped away to smoke a cigarette. Then, with calloused hands, they gently lowered the child’s body into the ground. Earlier that day, the groundskeepers at Sunset Gardens of Memory had dug […]