Public Health

Might Republicans make job-based health insurance taxable? And how can you fight an insurance denial for lung-cancer screening? Also, can pharmacists prescribe drugs? Here are answers to some recent questions from readers. Q: I’ve heard that Republicans plan to change the system so that I’d have to pay income taxes on my health insurance benefits. Is it true? […]

California’s public health department Wednesday fired the contractor responsible for enrolling patients in a state-run AIDS program, saying its poor performance threatened enrollees’ access to life-saving medications. The state announced it had terminated the contract with A.J. Boggs & Company because of several “material breaches,” including the failure to keep an online enrollment portal working […]

El Comité de Presupuesto del Congreso (CBO, por sus siglas en inglés) presentó su estimado sobre el impacto económico que el proyecto de salud republicano, “The American Health Care Act”, tendría en el sistema de atención de salud del país, y cuánto le costaría al gobierno federal. El plan está diseñado para rechazar y reemplazar […]

An electronic program launched in 2012 by Los Angeles County’s health care system has reduced wait times for specialty care and eliminated the need for some safety-net patients to see specialists at all, according to a new study in the journal Health Affairs. The program, eConsult, allows primary care doctors to get specialists’ advice for […]

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its estimate of what effects the Republican health bill, “The American Health Care Act,” would have on the nation’s health care system and how much it would cost the federal government. The GOP plan is designed to partially repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act passed during the Obama […]

Growing national concern about lead poisoning in children has prompted a California lawmaker to introduce legislation to ensure that all of the state’s kids are tested for the toxic metal. The bill, introduced by Assemblyman Bill Quirk (D-Hayward), would change the state’s Health and Safety Code to require testing for all children ages 6 months to 6 […]

When Donna Helen Crisp, a 59-year-old nursing professor, entered a North Carolina teaching hospital for a routine hysterectomy in 2007, she expected to come home the next day. Instead, Crisp spent weeks in a coma and underwent five surgeries to correct a near-fatal cascade of medical errors that left her with permanent injuries. Desperate for […]

An experimental treatment — which blinded three women after stem cells from abdominal fat were injected into their eyes — was advertised on a government-run clinical trial website but lacked proper safeguards, researchers reported Wednesday. The report in the New England Journal of Medicine notes that the procedures were part of a national rise in the […]

Even though the health risks to babies born before they reach full term at 39 weeks have long been recognized, nearly 1 in 10 babies in the United States is born prematurely. Texas decided to try to change that. In 2011, the Texas Medicaid program was the first in the country to take steps to curb elective early […]

When Tami Haught was diagnosed with HIV, she was one day shy of her 25th birthday. The diagnosis did not come as a shock since doctors had determined her fiancé was dying of AIDS several weeks earlier. In the two decades since, Haught, 48, has turned to expensive prescription drugs to keep the deadly infection […]