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In the wake of a ϳԹ News-New York Times series, members of the Special Committee on Aging are asking residents and their families to submit their bills and are calling for a Government Accountability Office study.
California’s governor vetoed a bill extending insurance coverage for kids with hearing loss, but most states now require it.
Thousands of people shared their experiences and related to the financial drain on families portrayed in the “Dying Broke” series, a joint project by ϳԹ News and The New York Times that examined the costs of long-term care.
A chronic health diagnosis and medical debt reordered Sharon Woodward's life.
The bottleneck caused by states’ reevaluation of Medicaid enrollees has swept up low-income families that rely on other safety-net services.
Candidates see former President Donald Trump’s embrace of his administration’s covid-19 vaccine policies as an opportunity to gain ground. So far, their efforts haven’t found traction.
Coping with disability — and the cost of coping with disability — is an enormously important issue for older adults. Nora Super, an expert on aging, shares her personal story.
Anti-abortion groups have lost seven consecutive elections on state ballot measures about abortion. They say they’re unfazed and plan to keep focusing on lawmakers and courts to notch wins.
School nurses treat children daily for a wide range of illnesses and injuries, and sometimes serve as a young patient’s only health provider. They also function as a point person for critical public health interventions. Yet many states don’t require them, and school districts struggle to hire them.
Ballad Health, the only hospital system across a large swath of Tennessee and Virginia, has fallen short of quality-of-care and charity care obligations — even as it’s sued thousands of patients for unpaid bills.
“People want covid-19 to be in the rearview mirror,” one nursing home official says. Faced with a slow rollout of the updated covid vaccines, and without state mandates for workers to get vaccinated, most skilled nursing facilities are relying on persuasion to boost vaccination rates among staff and residents.
Both sides, still at loggerheads over pay and staffing, agreed to keep bargaining after unions announced a possible strike Oct. 4-7. If no deal is reached, a walkout by about 75,000 KP workers in five states could disrupt care.
The proposal would require major hiring at the most sparsely staffed homes. But the proposal is already badly received by the nursing home industry, which claims it can’t boost wages enough to attract workers.
Chagas disease, caused by a parasite, affects people primarily in rural Latin America. But an estimated 300,000 residents of the U.S. have the disease, which can cause serious heart problems. Patient advocates call for much more aggressive efforts to fight it.
Last month, Florida joined a growing number of states in banning sales taxes on diapers to make them more affordable for older adults and families with young children. Though diapers are essential for many, they are not covered by food stamps. Nor are incontinence products for older adults typically covered by Medicare. The cost can easily add up on a fixed income.
Kristie Fields, a cancer patient in Virginia, was urged to go public to seek financial help. She worried about feeding hurtful stereotypes.
A quality-control crisis at an Indian pharmaceutical factory has left doctors and their patients with impossible choices as cheap, effective, generic cancer drugs go out of stock.
In what’s known as the Medicaid “unwinding,” states are combing through rolls to decide who stays and who goes. But the overwhelming majority of people who have lost coverage so far were dropped because of technicalities, not because officials determined they are no longer eligible.
After local leaders in rural Nevada reached an impasse over a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic, an anti-abortion activist pitching local abortion bans across the U.S. arrived at their remote City Hall.
The median life expectancy for a U.S. baby born with Down syndrome jumped from about four years in 1950 to 58 years in the 2010s. That’s largely because they no longer can be denied lifesaving care, including surgeries for heart defects. But now, aging adults with Down syndrome face a health system unprepared to care for them.
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