By Laura Ungar Kaiser Health News Liz Lucas got a call Tuesday afternoon from a friend she’d interacted with closely at a journalism conference in New Orleans days earlier who had tested presumptively positive for coronavirus. She wondered what this meant for her and those around her, so she reached[Read More…]
Health And Fitness
These stroke survivors may not be prescribed enough blood pressure meds
By American Heart Association News Nearly two-thirds of people who survive an often-deadly type of stroke caused by bleeding in the brain continue to experience high blood pressure because they aren’t taking enough medication, new research shows. The preliminary study, presented this week at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke[Read More…]
Hormone blocker shocker: Drug costs 8 times more when used for kids
By Sydney Lupkin NPR, Kaiser Health News Dr. Sudeep Taksali, an orthopedic surgeon, became worried that his 8-year-old daughter had already grown taller than his 12-year-old son. And sometimes she had an attitude more befitting a teenager. Something seemed wrong. Taksali and his wife, Sara, realized their daughter had grown[Read More…]
When your doctor is also a lobbyist: Inside the war over surprise medical bills
By Rachana Pradhan Kaiser Health News When Carol Pak-Teng, an emergency room doctor in New Jersey, hosted a fundraiser in December for Democratic freshman Rep. Tom Malinowski, her guests, mostly doctors, were pleased when she steered the conversation to surprise medical bills. This was a chance to send a message[Read More…]
Feds probing how personal Medicare info gets to marketers
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar Associated Press WASHINGTON — A government watchdog is launching a nationwide probe into how marketers may be getting seniors’ personal Medicare information aided by apparent misuse of a government system, officials said Friday. The audit will be formally announced next week said Tesia Williams, a spokeswoman for[Read More…]
How lifesaving organs for transplant go missing in transit
By Jonel Aleccia Kaiser Health News Scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are trashed each year and many more become critically delayed after being shipped on commercial airliners, a new investigation finds. When a human heart was left behind by mistake on a Southwest Airlines plane in 2018, transplant[Read More…]
Terminally ill, he wanted aid-in-dying. His Catholic hospital said no
By Jonel Aleccia Kaiser Health News GOLDEN, Colo. — The call came the last week of September, when Neil Mahoney could still stagger from his bed to the porch of his mobile home to let out his boisterous yellow Lab, Ryder. Rodney Diffendaffer, a clinical pharmacist in Longmont, 45 miles[Read More…]
Preeminent hospitals penalized over rates of patients’ injuries
By Jordan Rau Kaiser Health News Hundreds of hospitals across the nation, including a number with sterling reputations for cutting-edge care, will be paid less by Medicare after the federal government pronounced that they had higher rates of infections and patient injuries than others. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid[Read More…]
Human-to-human transmission confirmed in China coronavirus
By Yanan Wang And Ken Moritsugu Associated Press BEIJING — The head of a Chinese government expert team said Monday that human-to-human transmission has been confirmed in an outbreak of a new coronavirus, a development that raises the possibility that it could spread more quickly and widely. Team leader Zhong[Read More…]
Family doctors in rural America tackle crisis of addiction and pain
By Bram Sable-Smith Wisconsin Public Radio Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t fully grasp her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016. “He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalled Gatzke-Plamann.[Read More…]