Elisabeth Rosenthal - KFF Health News

The pharmaceutical industry has invented a new art form: finding ways to make their wares seem like joyous must-have treatments, while often minimizing lackluster efficacy and risks.

Legal maneuvering, industry lobbying and lax IRS oversight leave lots of room for “operating surpluses.”

A popular scale for measuring pain doesn’t work, but medicine still has no better alternative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.