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OAKLAND, Calif. — The patient was in his 60s, an African American man with emphysema. The oximeter placed on his fingertip registered well above the 88% blood oxygen saturation level that signals an urgent risk of organ failure and death.
Yet his doctor, Noha Aboelata, believed the patient was sicker than the device showed. So she sent him for a lab test, which confirmed her suspicion that he needed supplemental oxygen at home.
While hot-button health care issues such as abortion and the Affordable Care Act roil the presidential race, Democrats and Republicans in statehouses around the country have been quietly working together to tackle the nation’s medical debt crisis.
New laws to curb aggressive hospital billing, to expand charity care for lower-income patients, and to rein in debt collectors have been enacted in more than 20 states since 2021.
Democrats championed most measures. But the legislative efforts often passed with Republican support. In a few states, GOP lawmakers led the push to expand patient...
OAKLAND, Calif. — The patient was in his 60s, an African American man with emphysema. The oximeter placed on his fingertip registered well above the 88% blood oxygen saturation level that signals an urgent risk of organ failure and death.
Yet his doctor, Noha Aboelata, believed the patient was sicker than the device showed. So she sent him for a lab test, which confirmed her suspicion that he needed supplemental oxygen at home.
When Anna Nusslock showed up at her local hospital 15 weeks pregnant and in severe pain earlier this year, she said, a doctor delivered devastating news: The twins she and her husband had so desperately wanted were not viable. Further, her own health was in danger, and she needed an emergency abortion to prevent hemorrhaging and infection.
OAKLAND, California – El paciente tendría poco más de 60 años y era un hombre afroamericano con enfisema. El oxímetro colocado en la yema de su dedo registraba un nivel de saturación de oxígeno en sangre muy superior al 88%, el índice que indica un riesgo urgente de falla orgánica y muerte.
Sin embargo su médica, Noha Aboelata, creyó que estaba más enfermo que lo que indicaba el aparato. Así que lo envió a hacerse unos análisis de laboratorio que confirmaron su sospecha: el hombre necesitaba oxígeno suplementario en casa.
The Host
Julie Rovner
KFF Health News
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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.
As Nov. 5 approaches and the struggle for control of the U.S. House reaches a fever pitch, Democrats are doing everything they can to tie their Republican opponents to their antiabortion voting records. Some Republican candidates, meanwhile, seem to be softening their positions. And political analysts say it’s part of a larger trend playing out nationwide, up and down the ballot.
“The politics of abortion and reproductive health can get voters to participate at higher rates,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University. “Republicans have to moderate their...
Nearly 90% of babies who had to be hospitalized with covid-19 had mothers who didn’t get the vaccine while they were pregnant, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings appear in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Babies too young to be vaccinated had the highest covid hospitalization rate of any age group except people over 75.
More than four years ago, former President Donald Trump’s administration accelerated the development and rollout of the covid-19 vaccine. The project, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, likely saved millions of lives. But a substantial number of Republican voters now identify as vaccine skeptics — and Trump rarely mentions what’s considered one of the great public health accomplishments in recent memory.
“The Republicans don’t want to claim it,” Trump told an interviewer in late September.
Casi el 90% de los bebés que tuvieron que ser hospitalizados con covid-19 tenían madres que no se vacunaron mientras estaban embarazadas, según nuevos datos publicados por los Centros para el Control y Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC).
Los hallazgos aparecen en el Informe Semanal de Morbilidad y Mortalidad de la agencia.
Los bebés que fueron demasiado pequeños para vacunarse tuvieron la tasa de hospitalización por covid más alta de cualquier grupo de edad, excepto las personas mayores de 75 años.
Soon after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade abortion ruling in 1973, Laura Esserman used her high school graduation speech to urge her classmates to vote for the Equal Rights Amendment to expand women’s access to property, divorce, and abortion.
ADAIR, Iowa — The blue-and-white highway sign for the eastbound rest stop near here displays more than the standard icon of a person in a wheelchair, indicating facilities are accessible to people who can’t walk. The sign also shows a person standing behind a horizontal rectangle, preparing to perform a task.
The second icon signals that this rest area along Interstate 80 in western Iowa has a bathroom equipped with a full-size changing table, making it an oasis for adults and older children who use diapers because of disabilities.
“It’s a beacon of hope,” said Nancy Baker Curtis, whose 9-...
“Donald Trump said he was going to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. He never did. We did.”
Vice President Kamala Harris at the ABC News presidential debate, Sept. 10
Since Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, she and former President Donald Trump have sparred over their approaches to lowering prescription drug costs. Harris has described this as an important campaign promise that Trump made but didn’t deliver on.
“Donald Trump said he was going to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices,” Harris said during the ABC News debate on Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. “He...
Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz met in an Oct. 1 vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News that was cordial and heavy on policy discussion — a striking change from the Sept. 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Vance and Walz acknowledged occasional agreement on policy points and respectfully addressed each other throughout the debate. But they were more pointed in their attacks on their rival’s running mate for challenges facing the country, including immigration and inflation.
It was expected that the past year and a half would be a fraught time for Medicaid, the workhorse of the nation’s health system, which covers more people than any other government health insurance program.
In April 2023, states resumed screening people for Medicaid eligibility and terminating coverage for those they said no longer qualified or failed to renew, which had been prohibited under pandemic-era protections. Many health advocates feared the uninsured rate, which had just hit historic lows, would resurge.
Vice President Kamala Harris is seeing a surge of support from Black women voters, galvanized in part by her work on health care issues such as maternal mortality, reproductive rights, and gun control.
The enthusiasm may be key for Democratic turnout at the polls in critical battleground states.
Black women have always been among the most reliable voters in the Democratic base and were central to former President Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. Enthusiasm was also robust for President Joe Biden in 2020. But this year, before he bowed out of the race and Harris became the Democratic...
Dave Lantz is no stranger to emergency department or doctor bills. With three kids in their teens and early 20s, “when someone gets sick or breaks an arm, all of a sudden you have thousand-dollar medical bills,” Lantz said.
The family’s health plan that he used to get as the assistant director of physical plant at Lycoming College, a small liberal arts school in central Pennsylvania, didn’t start to cover their costs until they had paid $5,600 in medical bills. The Lantzes were on the hook up to that annual threshold. The high-deductible plan wasn’t ideal for the family of five, but it was...
Dave Lantz is no stranger to emergency department or doctor bills. With three kids in their teens and early 20s, “when someone gets sick or breaks an arm, all of a sudden you have thousand-dollar medical bills,” Lantz said.
The family’s health plan that he used to get as the assistant director of physical plant at Lycoming College, a small liberal arts school in central Pennsylvania, didn’t start to cover their costs until they had paid $5,600 in medical bills. The Lantzes were on the hook up to that annual threshold. The high-deductible plan wasn’t ideal for the family of five, but it was...
Sept. 26
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: Pediatricians won’t get refunds on all their unused covid vaccines, leaving some parents of children under 3 struggling to find them, and 2023 saw the largest number of abortions in more than a decade despite bans or heavy restrictions in 20 states.
Sept. 18
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: Botox could help people with a painful health condition that prevents them from burping, and shooting survivors can face a scarcity of mental health providers as they try to recover from trauma.
Sept. 12
SIKESTON, Mo. — At age 79, Nannetta Forrest, whose father, Cleo Wright, was lynched in Sikeston, Missouri, before she was born, wonders how the decades-long silence that surrounded his death in 1942 influenced her life.
In 2020, Sikeston police killed another young Black man, 23-year-old Denzel Taylor. Taylor’s shooting death immediately made local headlines, but then the cycle of silence in Sikeston repeated itself.
Host Cara Anthony and pediatrician Rhea Boyd draw health parallels between the loss experienced by two families nearly 80 years apart. In both cases, young daughters were left...
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