“Health-care costs are no longer escaping the nation’s fastest rate of inflation in four decades,” Rachel Roubein writes over at The Washington Post. “Prices for medical services in September rose 6.5 percent compared with a year ago, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released yesterday. The increase — which analysts expect to continue […]
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How much does a flu shot cost? $19.99 at Costco, $49.99 at CVS.
Flu shot costs are all over the map. For many of us it doesn’t matter: Many people have their entire flu shot cost covered by insurance, get their shot for free at work, or have a low enough co-pay and high enough income to make the cost not worrisome. For others, it matters a lot: […]
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UnitedHealth, profits and U.S. tax dollars
“Today is the day to really connect the dots about why we Americans have to pay so much for health insurance that so many of us can no longer even use. I really hope our employers and politicians see this. If this doesn’t get them outraged and willing to do something bold, I just don’t […]
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How insurers exploited Medicare Advantage for billions
“The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks,” Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz write over at The New York Times. “Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or […]
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Medical debt law: Help is limited
“CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After a year of chemo and radiation, doctors told Penelope ‘Penny’ Wingard in 2014 that her breast cancer was in remission,” Aneri Pattani writes over at Kaiser Health News. “She’d been praying for this good news. But it also meant she no longer qualified for a program in her state that offers […]
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Reporting an at-home Covid test to the authorities
A friend of ours sent the following account about reporting an at-home Covid test to the right public health authorities. I woke up one morning in September feeling absolutely fine and went on to have a typically active day. But by late afternoon I felt feverish. When I returned home, I reached into the back […]
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Doctors discriminate against people with disabilities, study finds
“More than 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities report having a difficult time accessing health care and often find that doctors’ offices refuse to accommodate them,” Kristin Samuelson writes over at the Northwestern University website. “Now, a new Northwestern Medicine study of national practices reports that […]
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Private equity group at high risk of bankruptcy, Moody’s warns
“Moody’s Investors Service has issued a scathing corporate credit rating downgrade to Envision Healthcare, assigning the physician staffing service and ambulatory surgery center operator its lowest possible junk rating and warning that a bankruptcy or major restructuring is likely on the horizon,” Dave Muoio writes over at FierceHealthcare. “The bond credit rating agency wrote in […]
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Who is still dying from Covid? The CDC can’t say.
“Earlier this week, President Joe Biden seemed to commit one of his trademark gaffes by saying ‘The pandemic is over,’” Faye Flam writes over at The Washington Post. “The backlash was swift. That’s understandable, given that hundreds of people are still dying from Covid every day. But President Biden may be doing what comes naturally […]
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Long Covid still strikes about 20% of the infected
“All over the world, the rates of death and hospitalization from Covid keep dropping. But our successful mitigation of the worst outcomes of the 33-month-old pandemic belie a growing crisis,” David Axe writes over at The Daily Beast. “More and more people are surviving Covid and staying out of the hospital, but more and more […]