About 3.7 million people are at immediate risk of losing health coverage should the federal government cut funding for Medicaid expansions, as some allies of President-elect Donald Trump have proposed. Coverage could be at risk in the 40 states that have expanded Medicaid.
Hundreds of people and the Federal Trade Commission weighed in on a proposed hospital merger in Terre Haute, Indiana, with most arguing that the creation of a monopoly would increase costs and worsen patient care.
Adults with disabilities and their caregivers are pressing governments and private businesses across the U.S. to help them avoid undignified public bathroom experiences.
If Indiana officials approve a proposed hospital merger in western Indiana in the coming months, the state will have its first hospital monopoly created by a “Certificate of Public Advantage.” Other such deals have resulted in government reports documenting diminished care in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Ballad Health, a 20-hospital system in Tennessee and Virginia, benefits from the largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly in the United States and is the only option for hospital care for a large swath of Appalachia.
Ballad Health was granted the nation’s largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly in 2018. Since then, its emergency rooms have become more than three times as slow.
“People want covid-19 to be in the rearview mirror,” one nursing home official says. Faced with a slow rollout of the updated covid vaccines, and without state mandates for workers to get vaccinated, most skilled nursing facilities are relying on persuasion to boost vaccination rates among staff and residents.
Kristie Fields, a cancer patient in Virginia, was urged to go public to seek financial help. She worried about feeding hurtful stereotypes.
The community of Bristol straddles the border between two states with very different abortion laws. Tennessee prohibits most abortions at about six weeks and will soon ban them nearly outright. Virginia allows them at least through the second trimester. To maintain abortion access in the area, staff at a clinic on the Tennessee side of the state line are helping open a clinic about a mile down the road on the Virginia side.
Sens. Robert Casey Jr. and Ron Wyden want a probe into what barriers are keeping Medicaid plans from reaching enrollees.
