Health Care Costs

The Host Julie Rovner KFF Health News @jrovner @julierovner.bsky.social Read Julie’s stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A […]

The Federal Trade Commission has challenged the validity of over 100 drug product patents, focusing on devices used to deliver medicines, like inhalers and autoinjectors, in an effort to increase competition and potentially lower some prices. The FTC says drugmakers illegitimately use the patents to prevent competitors from offering cheaper generic alternatives. It’s the first […]

Navigating the U.S. health care system can feel like a “battle royale.” From challenging unfair medical bills to wrestling with insurance companies over pre-authorizations, patients have to be ready to stick up for themselves.  So, how can you stay cool and confident in these fights? In this rebroadcast of “An Arm and a Leg” from […]

Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names. In response to Sarah Jane Tribble’s report about growing enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans — and the growing concerns — a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation weighed […]

When Kristy Uddin, 49, went in for her annual mammogram in Washington state last year, she assumed she would not incur a bill because the test is one of the many preventive measures guaranteed to be free to patients under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The ACA’s provision made medical and economic sense, encouraging Americans […]

It’s daggers out at the Federal Trade Commission in its fight against anticompetitive practices in health care. This past year, it has issued more stringent guidelines to block and discourage hospital mergers, and it investigated practices by middlemen in the drug supply chain. Now drug manufacturers themselves are in the agency’s crosshairs. In November, the FTC challenged the validity of more […]

Chantal Panozzo and her husband followed their primary care doctors’ orders last year after they both turned 45, now the recommended age to start screening for colorectal cancer. They scheduled their first routine colonoscopies a few months apart. Panozzo said she was excited to get a colonoscopy, of all things, because it meant free care. […]

New York City pledged this week to pay down $2 billion worth of residents’ medical debt. In doing so, it has come around to an innovation, started in the Midwest, that’s ridding millions of Americans of health care debt. The idea of local government erasing debt emerged a couple of years ago in Cook County, […]

HANOVER, N.H. — Health care issues are important to Lana Leggett-Kealey, who works as a genetic genealogist. But on Tuesday, as she walked out of her polling place at a local high school and into a frigid New England morning, she said she had something bigger on her mind when she cast her vote. “I […]

McALESTER, Okla. — It took little more than an hour for Deborah Hackler to dispense with the tall stack of debt collection lawsuits that McAlester Regional Medical Center recently brought to small-claims court in this Oklahoma farm community. Hackler, a lawyer who sues patients on behalf of the hospital, buzzed through 51 cases, all but […]