Public Health
KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: The Biden Health Agenda
Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on PRX. President Joe Biden wasted no time getting down to work. Among the raft of executive orders he signed on Inauguration Day were several aimed at curtailing the covid crisis, including one requiring mask-wearing by federal employees and anyone on federal property for the next 100 […]
After a Decade of Lobbying, ALS Patients Gain Faster Access to Disability Payments
Anita Baron first noticed something was wrong in August 2018, when she began to drool. Her dentist chalked it up to a problem with her jaw. Then her speech became slurred. She managed to keep her company, which offers financing to small businesses, going, but work became increasingly difficult as her speech worsened. Finally, nine […]
Door to Door in Miami’s Little Havana to Build Trust in Testing, Vaccination
Little Havana is a neighborhood in Miami that, until the pandemic, was known for its active street life along Calle Ocho, including live music venues, ventanitas serving Cuban coffee and a historic park where men gather to play dominoes. But during the pandemic, a group called Healthy Little Havana is zeroing in on this area with […]
Biden Takes the Reins, Calls for a United Front Against Covid and Other Threats
Joe Biden on Wednesday took the oath to become the 46th president of the United States, vowing to bring the nation together in the midst of an ongoing pandemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives, enormous economic dislocation and civil unrest so serious that the U.S. Capitol steps where he took his oath were […]
Advocates View Health Care as Key to Driving LGBTQ Rights Conversation
When Allison Scott came out as a trans woman in 2013, she told not only family and friends, but also her primary care physician. She didn’t need his help with hormone therapy. She had another doctor for that. But she wanted to share the information with her doctor of more than 10 years in case […]
California Is Overriding Its Limits on Nurse Workloads as Covid Surges
California’s telemetry nurses, who specialize in the electronic monitoring of critically ill patients, normally take care of four patients at once. But ever since the state relaxed California’s mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios in mid-December, Nerissa Black has had to keep track of six. And these six patients are really sick: Many of them are being treated […]
Biden’s Covid Challenge: 100 Million Vaccinations in the First 100 Days. It Won’t Be Easy.
It’s in the nature of presidential candidates and new presidents to promise big things. Just months after his 1961 inauguration, President John F. Kennedy vowed to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. That pledge was kept, but many others haven’t been, such as candidate Bill Clinton’s promise to provide […]
Patients Fend for Themselves to Access Highly Touted Covid Antibody Treatments
By the time he tested positive for covid-19 on Jan. 12, Gary Herritz was feeling pretty sick. He suspects he was infected a week earlier, during a medical appointment in which he saw health workers who were wearing masks beneath their noses or who had removed them entirely. His scratchy throat had turned to a […]
Are Public Health Ads Worth the Price? Not if They’re All About Fear
ST. LOUIS — The public service announcement showed a mother finding her teenage son lifeless, juxtaposed with the sound of a ukulele and a woman singing, “That’s how, how you OD’d on heroin.” It aired locally during the 2015 Super Bowl but attracted national attention and has been viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube. […]
Black Americans Are Getting Vaccinated at Lower Rates Than White Americans
Black Americans are receiving covid vaccinations at dramatically lower rates than white Americans in the first weeks of the chaotic rollout, according to a new KHN analysis. About 3% of Americans have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine so far. But in 16 states that have released data by race, white residents […]