The Host
Julie Rovner
KFF 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.
KFF Health News’ “Navigating Aging” columnist, Judith Graham, spent six months this year talking to older adults who live alone by choice or by circumstance — most commonly, a spouse’s death. They shared their hopes and fears, challenges, and strategies for aging solo.
Graham moderated a live event on Dec. 11, hosted by KFF Health News and The John A. Hartford Foundation. She invited five seniors ranging in age from 71 to 102 and from across the country — from Seattle; Chicago; Asheville, North Carolina; New York City; and rural Maine — to talk candidly about the ways they are thriving at...
The share of people who are Hispanic or Latino has grown to a little more than a quarter of the population in Elko, Nevada, a small city in the remote northeastern corner of the state. That growth in diversity has also led to an increasing number of people who speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish spoken in nearly 15 percent of households in Elko County, which has a population of about 54,000.
Anna Goldman, a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center, got tired of hearing that her patients couldn’t afford the electricity needed to run breathing assistance machines, recharge wheelchairs, turn on air conditioning, or keep their refrigerators plugged in. So she worked with her hospital on a solution.
The result is a pilot effort called the Clean Power Prescription program. The initiative aims to help keep the lights on for roughly 80 patients with complex, chronic medical needs.
The program relies on 519 solar panels installed on the roof of one of the hospital’s office...
Juana Valle never imagined she’d be scared to drink water from her tap or eat fresh eggs and walnuts when she bought her 5-acre farm in San Juan Bautista, California, three years ago. Escaping city life and growing her own food was a dream come true for the 52-year-old.
Then Valle began to suspect water from her well was making her sick.
“Even if everything is organic, it doesn’t matter, if the water underground is not clean,” Valle said.
A former Montana health department staffer who described himself as the lead author of legislation to scrutinize nonprofit hospitals’ charitable acts said new rules implementing the bill amounted to a hospital “wish list” and that the state needs to go back to the drawing board.
The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services recently adopted the rules outlining how the state will collect data on nonprofit hospitals’ charitable acts with the goal of eventually creating giving standards. That could include benchmarks, such as how much financial aid hospitals must provide patients.
Un juez federal en Dakota del Norte falló a favor de 19 estados que impugnaron una regla de la administración Biden que permite —por primera vez— que las personas traídas a Estados Unidos de niños, sin papeles, conocidas como Dreamers, se inscribieran para obtener cobertura de salud a través de los mercados establecidos por la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio (ACA).
A federal judge in North Dakota has ruled in favor of 19 states that challenged a Biden administration rule allowing — for the first time — enrollment in Affordable Care Act coverage by people brought to the U.S. as children without immigration paperwork, known as “Dreamers.”
Dec. 5
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: Leaders often fail to address racial health disparities even when they have data showing they exist, and state programs to import cheaper drugs from Canada are struggling to get off the ground.
Nov. 28
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: Some hospitals are rethinking IV hydration amid a nationwide IV fluid shortage, and rattlesnake antivenom is cheap to make but expensive to receive.
Nov. 21
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: In states without abortion bans, programs are trying to train more types of medical personnel to offer...
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)spent years complaining that the Biden administration was slow-walking federal approval of his plan to import lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada — a concept endorsed by Donald Trump in 2020 just before his first presidential term ended.
But nearly a year since the Food and Drug Administration green-lit the state’s importation strategy, Florida has no planned date to begin bringing drugs over the border, according to a state official familiar with the program who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Eloisa Mendoza has spent 18 years helping people who aren’t fluent in English navigate complex legal documents. She guides them through stressful events and accompanying dense paperwork, such as citizenship applications, divorces, and birth certificate translations.
“The future is here,” the email announced. Hilda Jaffe, then 88, was letting her children know she planned to sell the family home in Verona, New Jersey. She’d decided to begin life anew — on her own — in a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan.
Fourteen years later, Jaffe, now 102, still lives alone — just a few blocks away from the frenetic flashing lights and crowds that course through Times Square.
She’s the rarest of seniors: a centenarian who is sharp as a tack, who carries grocery bags in each hand when she walks back from her local market, and who takes city buses to...
It’s been about two years since most states began receiving millions of dollars in opioid settlement payments from companies that made or distributed prescription painkillers. But whether you can track how that windfall has been spent depends largely on where you live.
That’s because there is no federal standard dictating the information that must be made public. That determination falls to states.
Jeff Kromrey, 69, will sit down with his daughter the next time she visits and show her how to access his online accounts if he has an unexpected health crisis.
Gayle Williams-Brett, 69, plans to tackle a project she’s been putting off for months: organizing all her financial information.
Michael Davis, 71, is going to draft a living will and ask a close friend to be his health care surrogate and executor of his estate.
These seniors have been inspired to take these and other actions by an innovative course for such “solo agers”: Aging Alone Together, offered by Dorot, a social services...
Veteran California public servant Will Lightbourne has stepped in as interim executive director of the state’s mental health commission after its previous executive director resigned following conflict of interest allegations.
Lightbourne served as head of the state’s Department of Social Services for seven years before retiring in 2018 and had already returned to service once, as interim head of the Department of Health Care Services at the height of the covid-19 pandemic. On Nov. 4, he was tapped to lead the state’s Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission after...
Jeff Kromrey, de 69 años, se sentará con su hija la próxima vez que lo visite y le enseñará cómo acceder a sus cuentas en Internet en caso que sufra una crisis de salud inesperada.
Gayle Williams-Brett, también de 69, planea empezar un proyecto que lleva meses posponiendo: organizar toda su información financiera.
Michael Davis, de 71, va a redactar un testamento y va a pedirle a un amigo íntimo que sea su representante para asuntos de salud y albacea de su patrimonio.
KFF Health News senior correspondent Arthur Allen discussed the fragility of our vaccine infrastructure on The Atlantic’s “Radio Atlantic” on Dec. 5.
Click here to hear Allen on “Radio Atlantic”
Read Allen’s “Scientists Fear What’s Next for Public Health if RFK Jr. Is Allowed To ‘Go Wild’”
KFF Health News contributor Andy Miller discussed U.S. obesity rates on WUGA’s “The Georgia Health Report” on Nov. 29.
In recent decades, the Justice Department has sued several states for unnecessarily confining people with disabilities in places such as state psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes and segregated workspaces.
Such treatment violates a key part of the Americans With Disabilities Act — as affirmed in the 1999 Olmstead decision from the Supreme Court: that people with disabilities have a legal right to receive care at home or in other community settings.
KINGSPORT, Tenn. — Jerry Qualls had a heart attack in 2022 and was rushed by ambulance to Holston Valley Medical Center, where he was hospitalized for a week and kept alive by a ventilator and blood pump, according to his medical records.
His wife, Katherine Qualls, said his doctors offered little hope. In an interview and a written complaint to the Tennessee government, she said doctors at Holston Valley told her that her husband would not qualify for a heart transplant and shouldn’t be expected to recover.
Defiant, she insisted he be transferred hours away to a hospital in Nashville. Within...
The availability of safe, effective covid vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases.
Now, after backlash against public health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s best-known anti-vaccine activist, as its top health official, infectious disease and public health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and...
