Tag: Public Health

June 29, 2020

From Corcoran and Avenal state prisons in the arid Central Valley to historical San Quentin on the San Francisco Bay, California prisons have emerged as raging COVID-19 hot spots, even as the state annually spends more on inmate health care […]

June 26, 2020

Davetta Brooks, 75, who has heart failure, a fractured hip and macular degeneration, is afraid. Conditions in her low-income senior building on Chicago’s Near West Side — the Congressman George W. Collins Apartments — are “deplorable,” she said. Residents are […]

June 23, 2020

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers agreed Monday on a state budget plan that would avoid the deep cuts to essential health care services that the governor had initially proposed. Even though the state faces a massive […]

June 17, 2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Stacy Ellingen, 34, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, lost two of the three caregivers she depends on to dress, shower, eat and use the bathroom. The caregivers — both University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh students — returned to their […]

June 11, 2020

Around the country, nursing homes trying to protect their residents from the coronavirus eagerly await boxes of masks, eyewear and gowns promised by the federal government. But all too often the packages deliver disappointment — if they arrive at all. […]

June 10, 2020

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In late March, Andrea Laquatra began to feel sick. At first, it was an overwhelming fatigue, and the 32-year-old Cleveland mother of two tried to push through it. A fever, headaches and body aches soon followed. Then […]

June 8, 2020

The U.S. health care system is famously resistant to government-imposed change. It took decades to create Medicare and Medicaid, mostly due to opposition from the medical-industrial complex. Then it was nearly another half-century before the passage of the Affordable Care […]

May 27, 2020

New York City is in the process of figuring out when and how to reopen restaurants and bars safely with public health measures, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday. While the city has yet to meet all the requirements to […]

May 22, 2020

Hospitals around the country are afraid to send out hundreds of thousands of bills related to COVID-19 testing. That’s because Congress mandated there would be no copays and no out-of-pocket costs for patients. But many employers with self-funded health plans […]

May 19, 2020

Children have largely escaped the ravages of COVID-19, but children’s hospitals have not eluded the financial pain the pandemic has wrought on health care providers. Pediatric hospitals offered themselves as backups to their adult counterparts in case of a surge […]

May 8, 2020

Last week, after Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that Los Angeles was offering COVID-19 tests to all city and county residents, I decided to get one myself — and test Garcetti’s bold new promise in the bargain. I was surprised how […]

May 4, 2020

Months into the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, widespread diagnostic testing still isn’t available, and California offers a sobering view of the dysfunction blocking the way. It’s hard to overstate how uneven the access to critical test […]

May 1, 2020

Responding to weeks of criticism over his administration’s COVID-19 response, President Donald Trump claimed at a White House briefing that the United States has well surpassed other countries in testing people for the virus. “We’ve tested more than every country […]

April 30, 2020

TUPELO, Mississippi — Joe Delbert hadn’t needed the Tree of Life Free Clinic in three years. The 55-year-old man, who moved to Tupelo from Georgia to take care of his dying father nearly four years ago, found manufacturing work that […]

April 29, 2020

Even before a novel virus swept around the world, Anna Davis Abel wore a mask to protect herself from getting sick. The 25-year-old writer lives with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that makes her more susceptible to catching a virus […]

April 27, 2020

Karen Taylor had been coughing for weeks when she decided to see a doctor in early April. COVID-19 cases had just exceeded 5,000 in Texas, where she lives. Cigna, her health insurer, said it would waive out-of-pocket costs for “telehealth” […]

April 13, 2020

In the midst of the modern world’s greatest public health crisis, we must focus on keeping the lights on in our hospitals and medical care facilities. We’re rightly worried about shortages of personal protective equipment, the lack of testing capacity, […]

April 7, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday recommended wearing cloth face masks when going out, especially to places like grocery stores and pharmacies. That’s because a “significant portion” of people with the virus lack symptoms or can transmit […]

January 31, 2020

As many struggling rural hospitals are forced to close, Pew looks at ways states are thinking about filling the gaps, including expanding Medicaid, sending mobile medical units into remote areas, expanding telemedicine and encouraging young people in rural communities to […]

January 13, 2020

The news is actually more nuanced than it may have seemed last week. And much is riding on how the results are interpreted. In other public health news: “forever chemicals,” race and medicine, genetic sequencing of measles, sickle cell disease, […]