MILLSTADT, Ill. — It was a late Friday afternoon when a team of men approached a tiny pink casket. One wiped his brow. Another stepped away to smoke a cigarette. Then, with calloused hands, they gently lowered the child’s body into the ground. Earlier that day, the groundskeepers at Sunset Gardens of Memory had dug the small grave up on a hill in a special section of this cemetery in a southern Illinois community across the river from St. Louis. It was for a 3-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet. “It can be stressful sometimes,” Jasper Belt, 26, said. “We have to use little shovels.” More t ..read more

Brenna Kearney was seven months pregnant in December 2019 when she experienced what she thought were bad flu symptoms. Her husband, Casey Trumble, drove her from their Chicago home to her OB-GYN’s office at Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital downtown. With suddenly elevated blood pressure and protein in her urine, she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a potentially fatal but treatable pregnancy complication. Doctors admitted her to the hospital, saying she could expect to stay up to six weeks and have an induced delivery. Then Kearney developed a bad headache and her blood platelet ..read more

The Host Julie Rovner KHN @jrovner Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KHN’s 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 to Z,” now in its third edition. The abortion debate has changed dramatically in the seven months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and its nationwide right to abortion. Nearly half the states have banned or restricted the procedure, even though the public, at the ballot bo ..read more

California’s decision last month to cancel the results of a long-planned bidding competition among commercial health plans in its Medicaid program has some industry insiders and consumer advocates wondering whether the state can stand up to insurers and force improvements in care for millions of low-income beneficiaries. In a backroom agreement announced in the final days of 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, facing lawsuits, granted concessions that allowed major insurers to claw back business they would have lost had health officials stuck with the state’s initial contract awards for ..read more

Today, KHN has released details of 90 previously secret government audits that reveal millions of dollars in overpayments to Medicare Advantage health plans for seniors. The audits, which cover billings from 2011 through 2013, are the most recent financial reviews available, even though enrollment in the health plans has exploded over the past decade to over 30 million and is expected to grow further. KHN has published the audit spreadsheets as the industry girds for a final regulation that could order health plans to return hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars or more in overchar ..read more

Mark Buck, a physician and pharmacist in Helena, Montana, said he’s been seeing more patients turn to urgent care clinics when they run out of medication. Their doctors have retired, moved away, or left the field because they burned out during the covid-19 pandemic, leaving the patients with few options to renew their prescriptions, he said. “Access is where we’re really hurting in this state,” Buck said. Senate Bill 112, sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom McGillvray, would address that need by expanding the limited authority Montana already gives pharmacists to prescribe medications and devices ..read more

The Host Julie Rovner KHN @jrovner Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KHN’s 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 to Z,” now in its third edition. The abortion debate has changed dramatically in the seven months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and its nationwide right to abortion. Nearly half the states have banned or restricted the procedure, even though the public, at the ballot bo ..read more

“Almost every study now has said with these new boosters, you’re more likely to get infected with the bivalent booster.” Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, on Jan. 17, 2023, during a press conference As he proposed to extend the state’s ban on mandates for covid vaccines and face masks, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis lobbed a flurry of criticism at President Joe Biden and “the medical establishment.”  “They were not following the science,” DeSantis said at a Jan. 17 press conference in Panama City Beach. “Almost every study now has said with these new boosters, you’re m ..read more

The covid-19 pandemic has spurred a surge in the proportion of Californians who are dying at home rather than in a hospital or nursing home, accelerating a slow but steady rise that dates back at least two decades. The recent upsurge in at-home deaths started in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and the rate has continued to climb, outlasting the rigid lockdowns at hospitals and nursing homes that might help explain the initial shift. Nearly 40% of deaths in California during the first 10 months of 2022 took place at home, up from about 36% for all of 2019, according to death certificate d ..read more

WAUKON, Iowa — Marjorie Kruger was stunned to learn last fall that she would have to leave the nursing home where she’d lived comfortably for six years. The Good Samaritan Society facility in Postville, Iowa, would close, administrators told Kruger and 38 other residents in September. The facility joined a growing list of nursing homes being shuttered nationwide, especially in rural areas. “The rug was taken out from under me,” said Kruger, 98. “I thought I was going to stay there the rest of my life.” Her son found a room for her in another Good Samaritan center in Waukon, a small town 18 mil ..read more