After baby Dorian Bennett arrived two months early and spent more than 50 days in the neonatal ICU, his parents received a bill of more than $550,000 — despite having insurance. The Florida hospital had a not-so-helpful suggestion: monthly payments of more than $45,000 for a year.
A mother’s immune response to covid can be a greater danger to the fetus than the virus itself.
Although covid vaccines have been available to children as young as 5 for more than a month, they’re not being offered in some rural Montana counties, and parents don’t know where to find them in others.
In the middle of a measles outbreak in 1977, the Los Angeles school system required students to be inoculated or stay out of class. Other school systems followed the practice. Will it work again now that the county is insisting that teens have their shots against covid?
Grieving children face grave risks to their well-being, both in the short and long term. But there is no concerted government effort to help the estimated 140,000 children who have lost a parent in the pandemic.
With kids back in school, business is picking back up for professional nitpickers. But how are kids getting head lice if they’re physically distancing in the classroom?
Health officials hope the rollout of covid shots for young children and other initiatives will boost routine vaccine rates that dropped during the pandemic and narrow socioeconomic disparities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers guidance but calls for localities to set quarantine rules for unvaccinated children exposed to someone with covid-19. That’s led to a pandemic patchwork of rules.
Congress is making slow progress toward completing its ambitious social spending bill, although its Thanksgiving deadline looks optimistic. Meanwhile, a new survey finds the average cost of an employer-provided family plan has risen to more than $22,000. That’s about the cost of a new Toyota Corolla. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News and Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also this week, Rovner interviews Rebecca Love, a nurse academic and entrepreneur, about the impending crisis in nursing.
Kids who need a hormone-blocking drug to delay puberty have lost an off-label option. The nearly identical drug the company still sells costs eight times more.
