Although laws prohibit price gouging on precious resources in times of emergency, states have been forced to compete for a share of the nation’s stockpile of ventilators — used to treat the sickest COVID patients — or pay top dollar on sideline deals. With quality and quantity control lacking, what happens when the pandemic’s second wave hits?
But some of those options, like special enrollment periods, are time-sensitive.
The shortages are so dire that nursing homes and other health centers are going to extraordinary lengths for masks, gowns and essential materials.
Health clinics in isolated African American communities in the San Francisco Bay Area provide crucial services to neglected populations. But like thousands of other community clinics around the nation, their finances have been wrecked by the pandemic shutdown.
Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the public seems more confused than ever. And health officials still are not all on the same page; this week the World Health Organization had to walk back an official’s statement about how commonly the virus is spread by people without symptoms. Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post and Mary Ellen McIntire of CQ Roll Call join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss this and more. Also, Rovner interviews Michael Mackert, a professor and health communications expert at the University of Texas-Austin, about how health information can best be translated to the public.
More than 3,000 nursing homes reported less than a week’s worth of supplies, and 653 said they had run out entirely at some point. Stopgap FEMA equipment has not reached many facilities, and packages that have arrived have fallen short of promises.
The practice of narrative medicine helps health care professionals hear the life stories behind a patient’s immediate complaints. Some doctors are finding that these skills also provide an alcove of needed reflection amid the pandemonium of COVID-19.
Off-duty medical professionals joined protests in Denver and elsewhere sparked by George Floyd’s death to treat injured protesters, risking injury themselves.
A New Jersey family tried everything they could to save their father and sister, but faced shortages of protective gear and grim hospital conditions.
A public hospital in Cleveland has been trying to keep COVID patients out of its beds. It tried a number of innovations for developing better communication — even better relationships — with patients. Officials think this groundwork helped keep the outbreak at bay — and should be the new business model going forward.
