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The Biden administration is requiring workers at health care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid payments to be vaccinated. For the minority of nursing students who have refused a shot, the new policy could mean they can鈥檛 get the training they need in a hospital or other health care venue.
San Juan County, Colorado, is one of the most vaccinated counties in the U.S. Leaders across the country continue to expound on the vaccine as the path forward in the pandemic. But San Juan鈥檚 experience the past few weeks with its first covid hospitalizations shows that, even with an extremely vaccinated population, masks are still necessary.
KHN gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
Patients sickened in heat waves, flooding and wildfire have raised awareness of climate change鈥檚 impact on health. Now, some hospitals are building solar panels and cutting waste to reduce their own carbon footprints, with support from a new office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But the industry is moving slowly.
Britney Spears was forced into psychiatric care 鈥 and compelled to pay for it. That can happen to any patient who has an episode of serious mental illness, piling financial woes onto their stress and vulnerability.
Billings Clinic in Montana is past the tipping point as it looks for places to add intensive care unit beds and is on the cusp of rationing care to deal with the surge of sick covid patients in a state with significant anti-vaccination sentiment.
This episode highlights how New York enacted a charity care law, one of the precursors to the federal provision on charity care in the Affordable Care Act. 聽
Patients with advanced cancer and heart disease are among those who have had to have surgeries and other treatments delayed and rescheduled as a high number of critically ill, unvaccinated covid patients strain the medical system.
A hospital in Bozeman, Montana, is considering whether to add inpatient psychiatric care after a concerted push from mental health advocates. But even if it adds beds, hospitals across Montana provide a cautionary tale: finding enough workers to staff such beds is its own challenge, and some behavioral health units routinely reach capacity.
Unvaccinated people are filling intensive care beds and dying of covid in record numbers in Tennessee and other Southern states. Many tell their nurses and doctors they regret the decision not to get the vaccine when they could.
Many more people could benefit from the lifesaving treatment than are receiving it, which has made for messy triaging as the delta variant surges across the South and in rural communities with low covid vaccination rates.
Zoom in on states with overall good vaccination rates and you see a checkerboard effect, with rural areas far lagging urban zones. That鈥檚 allowed the pandemic to rage in places like Jackson County, Oregon, overwhelming hospitals.
After months of burnout from the pandemic, hospitals are scrambling to fill nursing and other jobs. Some administrators, particularly in rural areas, are afraid to implement vaccine mandates that alienate their short-handed staffs.
A Seattle patient discovers the hard way that you can still hit a lifetime limit for certain types of care. And health plans can vary a lot from one job to the next, even if the insurer is the same.
The FDA鈥檚 formal approval of the first vaccine to prevent covid-19 may or may not prompt doubters to go out and get shots, but it has clearly prompted employers to make vaccination a work requirement. Meanwhile, moderates and liberals in the U.S. House put aside their differences long enough to keep a giant social-spending bill on track, at least for now. Joanne Kenen of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet join KHN鈥檚 Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for 鈥渆xtra credit,鈥 the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
Nonprofit hospitals of all sizes have been trying their luck as venture capitalists, saying their investments improve care through the creation of new medical devices, health software and other innovations. But the gamble at times has been harder to pull off than expected.
The man famous for taking on Big Tobacco in the '90s, and winning, launched a series of ill-fated national lawsuits against nonprofit hospitals. This episode is the first in a series looking at the origins of charity care.
In another twist on covid vaccine hesitancy, blood centers say they are starting to hear from transfusion patients demanding blood from unvaccinated donors. Experts say the option is neither practical nor medically justifiable.
Amid a surge in covid-19 cases driven by the highly contagious delta variant, nearly 1,500 health systems across the nation are requiring their employees to get vaccinated. In Montana and Oregon, that鈥檚 not an option.
Aggressive sales tactics have allegedly led surgeons to use defective or wrong-size implants, screws or other products on patients, including former Olympian Mary Lou Retton.
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