Category: Health Policy
Abortion Emerges as Most Important Election Issue for Young Women, Poll Finds
Nearly 4 in 10 women under 30 surveyed in September and early October told pollsters that abortion is the most important issue to their vote. Just 20% named abortion as their top issue when KFF conducted a similar survey in late May and early June.
Continue reading
Abortion Emerges as Most Important Election Issue for Young Women, Poll Finds
Nearly 4 in 10 women under 30 surveyed in September and early October told pollsters that abortion is the most important issue to their vote. Just 20% named abortion as their top issue when KFF conducted a similar survey in late May and early June.
Continue reading
What’s New and What To Watch For in the Upcoming ACA Open Enrollment Period
Current enrollees who do not update their information or select an alternative will be automatically reenrolled in their current plan or, if that plan is no longer available, into a plan with similar coverage.
Continue reading
Will abortion swing the first post-Roe presidential election?
Throughout this election cycle, polls in the swing states have shown bipartisan support for abortion rights, especially when voters are educated about what abortion bans do. Voters in more than half of the states expected to determine the presidential winner have, to varying degrees, lost access to abortion. And abortion-rights activists across these states told States Newsroom they are determined to protect that access, or to get it back.
Continue reading
U.S. Has Lowest Life Expectancy Among Rich, English-Speaking Countries: Study
A new study comparing expected lifespans among six high-income English-speaking countries found that Australians live the longest while American lifespans faltered over the last three decades.
Continue reading
Small-Town Patients Face Big Hurdles as Rural Hospitals Cut Cancer Care
For rural patients, getting cancer treatment close to home has always been difficult. But in recent years, chemotherapy deserts have expanded across the United States, with 382 rural hospitals halting services from 2014 to 2022.
Continue reading
Inside Project 2025: Former Trump Official Outlines Hard Right Turn Against Abortion
Under Severino’s vision for HHS, federal approval of one commonly used abortion drug, mifepristone, could be revisited and potentially withdrawn.
Health agencies would promote “fertility awareness” as an “unsurpassed” method of contraception.
Medicaid, the public health insurance program that covers more than 75 million low-income and disabled people, could be converted into block grants that
Democrats say would result in far lower funding and enrollment.
HHS itself would be known as the Department of Life, underscoring a new focus on opposing abortion.
Continue reading
Why Many Nonprofit (Wink, Wink) Hospitals Are Rolling in Money
“Hospitals are some of the biggest businesses in the U.S. — nonprofit in name only,” said Martin Gaynor, an economics and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They realized they could own for-profit businesses and keep their not-for-profit status. So the parking lot is for-profit; the laundry service is for-profit; they open up for-profit entities in other countries that are expressly for making money. Great work if you can get it.”
Continue reading
States struggle to help patients navigate insurance hurdle known as ‘step therapy’
Millions of Americans have experienced similar frustrations under protocols known as step therapy, or fail-first policies. Insurance companies, and the pharmacy benefit management companies that handle prescriptions for them, often refuse to cover a specific drug until after the patient has tried cheaper alternatives. Insurers argue that step therapy — taking drug treatment one step a time — prevents wasteful spending by directing patients to less expensive, but still effective, treatments.
Continue reading
Arizona’s now-repealed abortion ban serves as a cautionary tale for reproductive health care across the US
Medical students are less inclined to enter the specialty and more likely to avoid training positions, employment or both in states with restrictive or near-total bans. These states also have difficulty retaining existing OB-GYNs.
Continue reading
Future pandemics will have the same human causes as ancient outbreaks
Lessons from anthropology can help prevent them
Continue reading
Census change will lead to more data on health of Middle Eastern, North African people in US
For decades, U.S. residents with heritage from the Middle East and North Africa, which is known internationally as the MENA region, have been classified by the government as white. The grouping masked differences in income, health, housing and other important markers.
Continue reading
Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Aimed to Make Cops a Gateway to Rehab, Not Jail. State Leaders Failed to Make It Work.
Ballot Measure 110, approved by voters in 2020, created a new role for law enforcement in Oregon. While there’s evidence people living with addiction in the state are increasingly finding their way into treatment, the failure to turn police encounters into successful on-ramps to rehab has been cited by critics as prime evidence the measure isn’t working. Oregon lawmakers, noting an ongoing rise in overdose deaths, are now looking to restore jail time for drug possession.
But Oregon’s political leaders themselves played central roles in failing to deliver on the potential for law enforcement to connect people with lifesaving services under the new measure, documents and interviews with a wide array of people involved in the system indicate.
Continue reading
Governments can erase your medical debt for pennies on the dollar — and some are
Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcies in the United States, and more than 2 in 5 American adults have some. Some states and cities will use federal money to forgive millions of dollars of their residents’ medical debt.
Continue reading
Viewpoint: Restricting Obese Women From IVF Is Discriminatory
Fertility clinics bar women with obesity from their services, despite the lack of medical evidence for doing so.
Continue reading