Elisabeth Rosenthal - KFF Health News
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Crowdsourcing has paid for honeymoon trips, graduation gifts and church missions to overseas hospitals. Now it has become a go-to for patients trying to escape medical billing nightmares.
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The ACA designers might have assumed that they spelled out with sufficient clarity that millions would no longer have to pay for certain types of preventive care. But they didn’t reckon with America’s ever-creative medical billing juggernaut.
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It’s a big job clearing out so-called “patent thickets” drugmakers create to keep their products’ prices high. But the Federal Trade Commission is giving it a shot.
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Convenient as it may be, beware of getting your blood drawn at a hospital. As one Texas woman discovered, the cost could be higher than at an independent lab, and your insurance might not cover it.
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The CDC’s RSV vaccination recommendations beg the question: How much should an immunization that will possibly be given to millions of Americans cost to be truly valuable?
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The declining share of U.S. doctors in adult primary care is about 25% — a point beyond which many Americans won’t be able to find a family doctor at all.
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Brand-name drug prices in the U.S. — more than three times the price in other developed countries — are related neither to the amount of research and development nor their therapeutic value, research shows.
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After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with huge medical systems monopolizing care in many cities, states, and even whole regions of the country.
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HHS is tasked with monitoring denials both by ACA plans and those offered through employers and insurers. As ’ denials become more common, they sometimes defy not just medical standards but sheer logic. Why hasn’t the agency fulfilled its assignment?
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Given a dire shortage of behavioral health providers in the U.S., it may prove tempting for insurers to offer up apps and chatbots to meet the federal mental health parity requirement.