Author: Amaury Abreu

Jennifer Smithfield felt weak and still had trouble breathing in February after nearly two weeks with covid-19. It was a Sunday, and her doctor’s office was closed. So her primary care physician suggested going to an emergency room to be safe. Smithfield went to HCA Healthcare’s flagship hospital, near its corporate headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, and thought she would be checked out and sent home. But that’s not what happened. “Even though I did not feel well, I didn’t think it was bad enough to be hospitalized, especially not multiple days,” Smithfield said. Over three days, Smithfield racked up $40,000…

Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on Acast. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here for a transcript of the episode. It’s open enrollment time for Affordable Care Act health coverage. And for the first time, people are enrolling with comparatively little controversy, as most Republicans have moved on from trying to repeal the law. On the campaign trail, meanwhile, Democrats are charging that if Republicans win majorities in the U.S. House or Senate, they will try to cut Social Security and Medicare. This week’s…

A month before Election Day, as Republicans in Congress dodged questions about a proposal to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) tweeted that he wanted to talk about moms and babies. Grassley, in the midst of what may be his closest race since becoming a senator in 1980, said he hears a lot about a lack of prenatal care in rural Iowa. He introduced his answer, called the Healthy Moms and Babies Act. “This bill will help fill those voids in rural America to make sure that we can deliver health care for high-risk pregnancies,”…

One patient had two toddlers already and was trying to extract herself from an abusive relationship. Another ended up in Michigan after trying to get care in her home state of Ohio; she was handed a Bible at a crisis pregnancy center but no abortion pills. A third thought her childbearing years were behind her and had been looking forward to rejoining the workforce. All three women sought abortion care at Northland Family Planning Center in Sterling Heights, a city in the metro Detroit area. And all told their stories to reporter Kate Wells as she embedded in the clinic…

https://californiahealthline.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/11/scifri202211041.mp3 “No one walks into my office and says, ‘I plan on missing a pill,’” said obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Mitchell Creinin. “There is no such thing as perfect use, we are all real-life users,” said Creinin, a professor at the University of California-Davis who wrote a widely used textbook that details contraceptive failure rates. Even when the odds of contraception failure are small, the number of incidents can add up quickly. More than 47 million women of reproductive age in the United States use contraception and, depending on the birth control method, hundreds of thousands of unplanned pregnancies can occur each…

Doris Spatz takes a once-a-day pill, Kisqali, to keep her metastatic breast cancer in check. As a patient in the Defense Department health system, she can fill routine prescriptions at a military pharmacy without a copay but also has the option of using a regular pharmacy through Tricare, the Defense Department’s private health care program. Spatz found a local pharmacy in her Alexandria, Virginia, neighborhood and was getting the life-preserving medicine there. That is, until Oct. 24, when Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefit manager for Tricare, dropped nearly 15,000 pharmacies from its network. Many of them were small, independent pharmacies,…

For drugmaker Pfizer, a fortune amassed in the covid pandemic is now paving the path to pharma nirvana: a weight loss pill worth billions. The company has reaped nearly $100 billion from selling covid-19 vaccines and treatments to U.S. taxpayers and foreign governments. With that windfall, it plans to get richer, sinking the cash into developing and marketing potential blockbusters for conditions like migraines, ulcerative colitis, prostate cancer, sickle cell disease, and obesity. It just announced it will triple or even quadruple the price of its covid vaccine once it goes on the commercial market next year. Meanwhile, the company…

HUNTINGTON PARK, Calif. — Jonathan Flores spent a sunny Saturday in late October knocking on the doors of registered voters in this predominantly Latino working-class town in southeastern Los Angeles County. Most people weren’t home or didn’t come to the door. Some of those who did expressed strong opinions about Joe Biden and Donald Trump and took an interest in abortion rights and clean-air initiatives on the California ballot for the Nov. 8 election. One young man gave Flores the brush-off, saying he doubted his vote would be counted. Like the other canvassers sent out that day by AltaMed Health…

When Susie Talevski sued the agency that managed her elderly father’s care before he died, she hoped to get justice for her family. She did not expect the case would grow into a national bellwether. A ruling against her could strip millions of vulnerable Americans of their power to hold states accountable when they do not receive benefits allowed by law. “This case has taken on, really, a life of its own way beyond what I could have foreseen,” said Talevski, a resident of Valparaiso, Indiana. Talevski filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging that her father’s rights were violated at…

The Nov. 8 election will wash in a wave of new people who will represent southcentral Pennsylvania in the state House of Representatives.