healthcarecosts
Marisol Pantoja Toribio found a lump in her breast in early January. Uninsured and living in California without legal status and without her family, the usually happy-go-lucky 43-year-old quickly realized how limited her options were. “I said, ‘What am I going to do?’” she said in Spanish, quickly getting emotional. She immediately worried she might have cancer. “I went back and forth — I have , I don’t have it, I have it, I don’t have it.” And if she was sick, she added, she wouldn’t be able to work or pay her rent. Without health insurance, Pantoja Toribio couldn’t afford to find out if she ...
Kaiser Health News
Cass Smith-Collins jumped through hoops to get the surgery that would match his chest to his gender. Living in Las Vegas and then 50, he finally felt safe enough to come out as a transgender man. He had his wife’s support and a doctor’s letter showing he had a long history of gender dysphoria, the psychological distress felt when one’s sex assigned at birth and gender identity don’t match. Although in-network providers were available, Smith-Collins selected Florida-based surgeon Charles Garramone, who markets himself as an early developer of female-to-male top surgery and says that he does not...
Kaiser Health News
When Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, got hit by a cyberattack this winter, a big chunk of the nation’s doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, and therapists stopped getting paid. The hack also limited health providers’ ability to share medical records and other information critical to patient care. The cyberattack revealed an often overlooked part of how health care is paid for in the United States and raised concerns for antitrust advocates about how large UnitedHealth has grown. Host Dan Weissmann speaks with reporters Brittany Trang of Stat News and Maureen Tkacik of The Am...
Kaiser Health News
Private Medicaid health plans lost millions of members in the past year as pandemic protections that prohibited states from dropping anyone from the government program expired. But despite Medicaid’s unwinding, as it’s known, at least two of the five largest publicly traded companies selling plans have continued to increase revenue from the program, according to their latest earnings reports. “It’s a very interesting paradox,” said Andy Schneider, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, of plans’ Medicaid revenue increasing despite enrollment drops. Med...
Kaiser Health News
New technologies are making it easier for companies to fix prices and discriminate against individual consumers, the Biden administration’s top consumer watchdog said Tuesday. Algorithms make it possible for companies to fix prices without explicitly coordinating with one another, posing a new test for regulators policing the market, said Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, during a media event hosted by KFF. “I think we could be entering a somewhat novel era of pricing,” Khan told reporters. Khan is regarded as one of the most aggressive antitrust regulators in recent U.S. histo...
Kaiser Health News
Carrie Lester looks forward to the phone call every Thursday from her doctors’ medical assistant, who asks how she’s doing and if she needs prescription refills. The assistant counsels her on dealing with anxiety and her other health issues. Lester credits the chats for keeping her out of the hospital and reducing the need for clinic visits to manage chronic conditions including depression, fibromyalgia, and hypertension. “Just knowing someone is going to check on me is comforting,” said Lester, 73, who lives with her dogs, Sophie and Dolly, in Independence, Kansas. At least two-thirds of Medi...
Kaiser Health News
Tax season is never fun. But some tax filers this year face an added complication: Their returns are being rejected because they failed to provide information about Affordable Care Act coverage they didn’t even know they had. While the concern about unscrupulous brokers enrolling unsuspecting people in ACA coverage has simmered for years, complaints have risen in recent months as consumers discover their health insurance coverage isn’t what they thought it was. Now such unauthorized enrollments are also causing tax headaches. Returns are getting rejected by the IRS and some people will have to...
Kaiser Health News
Nearly a quarter of adults disenrolled from Medicaid in the past year say they are now uninsured, according to a survey released Friday that details how tens of millions of Americans struggled to retain coverage in the government insurance program for low-income people after pandemic-era protections began expiring last spring. The first national survey of adults whose Medicaid eligibility was reviewed during the unwinding found nearly half of people who lost their government coverage signed back up weeks or months later — suggesting they should never have been dropped in the first place. While...
Kaiser Health News
The Host Julie RovnerKFF Health News @jrovner Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition. The Arizona Supreme Court shook up the national abortion debate this week, ruling that a ban originally passed in 1864 — before the end of the Civil War and decades before Arizona became a state — could be enforced. As in some other ...
Kaiser Health News
Covering the American health care system means we tell some scary stories. This episode of “An Arm and a Leg” sounds like a real horror movie. It uses one of Hollywood’s favorite tropes: machines taking over. And the machines belong to the private health insurance company UnitedHealth Group. Host Dan Weissmann talks to Stat News reporter Bob Herman about his investigation into Medicare Advantage plans that use an algorithm to make decisions about patient care. The algorithm is owned by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. Herman tells Weissmann that some of UnitedHealth’s own employees say the ...
Kaiser Health News
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