Category: Health

KFF Health News Midwest correspondent Bram Sable-Smith discussed personhood laws in Missouri and beyond on “Texas Standard” and KCUR’s “Kansas City Today” on May 11. He discussed the expansion of personhood laws also on KMOX’s “Total Information AM” on May 8. Click here to hear Sable-Smith on Texas Standard Click here to hear Sable-Smith on […]

If Envision Healthcare files for bankruptcy, a group of emergency room doctors would seek permission to continue their federal lawsuit that claims the private equity-backed company is violating California’s ban on corporate control of medical practices. “I anticipate that we would ask the bankruptcy judge to let our case proceed,” said David Millstein, an attorney […]

Fred Clasen-Kelly Brenda Powell had suffered a stroke and was in debilitating pain when she called the Social Security Administration last year to seek disability benefits. The former Louisiana state office worker struggled at times to write her name or carry a glass of water. Powell, then 62, believed she could no longer work, and […]

What use could health care have for someone who makes things up, can’t keep a secret, doesn’t really know anything, and, when speaking, simply fills in the next word based on what’s come before? Lots, if that individual is the newest form of artificial intelligence, according to some of the biggest companies out there. Companies […]

Rae Ellen Bichell and Helen Santoro GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — At first glance, nothing seems particularly unusual about the four-room school in this western Colorado city. Inside, six students are learning about radioactivity. The walls of their classroom are plastered with motivational messages like “Determination” and “Courage” scribbled onto paper cutouts of stars and moons. […]

When 28-year-old Navy veteran Carisma Carter pulled her car up to the front of the Atlanta VA Clinic, her seat was pushed far back from the steering wheel to make room for her big belly. Carter was 8 months pregnant. “I’m having two boys, twins. It’s my first pregnancy,” she said. Carter knows the pregnancy […]

For two decades, patients and physicians eagerly awaited a lower-cost version of the world’s bestselling drug, Humira, while its maker, AbbVie, fought off potential competitors by building a wall of more than 250 patents around it. When the first Humira biosimilar — essentially a generic version — finally hit the market in January, it came […]

Dan Weissmann Many people searching for a therapist or psychiatrist turn to the list of in-network providers offered by their insurance plan. But often, many of the doctors on the list don’t take that insurance plan, aren’t accepting new patients, or simply don’t answer the phone. Researchers and journalists call this phenomenon a “ghost network.” […]

Colleen DeGuzman The decades-old system Texas foster care officials use to track and monitor the health records of the nearly 20,000 children in their custody is both outdated and unreliable — so much so, advocates say, that children have been harmed or put at risk. And those deficiencies persist despite a 2015 order by a […]

Michael Vera walked into a bedroom of a residential drug treatment program in Los Angeles in March to find its occupant slumped over on his bed and struggling to breathe, a homemade straw on the floor beside him and tinfoil with what appeared to be drug residue under his body. The 35-year-old overdose victim had […]