Kaiser Health News, Cost & Quality Blog

Pediatric hospitals are creating clinics for the increasing number of children reporting lingering covid symptoms similar to those that plague some adults long after they have recovered.

“An Arm and a Leg” is updating a story, first reported in 2019, about how insulin got to be so expensive. The latest news is more encouraging than expected.

A student sought counseling help after feeling panicked when she had trouble paying a big tuition bill. A weeklong stay in a psychiatric hospital followed — along with a $3,413 bill. The hospital soft-pedaled its charity care policy.

Renowned medical centers are among the quarter of general hospitals that will lose 1% of Medicare payments for one year because their patients have high rates of bedsores, sepsis and other preventable complications.

Each year, Medicare punishes hospitals that have high rates of readmissions and high rates of infections and patient injuries. Check out which hospitals have been penalized.

State officials recently unveiled a “master plan” to address the needs of California’s rapidly aging population, from housing to long-term care. Kim McCoy Wade, director of the state Department of Aging, vows it will not end up on a shelf gathering dust.

A video on the social media platform TikTok explains how consumers can “crush” their hospital bills using charity care policies. This won’t work for all medical bills, but it might be a good place to start.

The measures would impose taxes on increases in the price of drugs that don’t reflect improved clinical value and set the rates paid by state-run and commercial health plans to a benchmark based on prices in Canada.

Jeff Bloom, a lawyer who used to represent medical-bill collectors in court, is sharing what he knows. “I was a bad guy, for sure,” he said. Then, a few years ago, he switched sides.

Lawmakers answered pleas from strained health facilities in rural areas, agreed to cover the cost of training more new doctors, sought to strengthen efforts to equalize mental health coverage with that of physical medicine and instructed the federal government to collect data that could be used to rein in high medical bills.

Host Dan Weissmann talked about a new federal rule — a requirement for hospitals to make public the prices they negotiate with insurers — with Niala Boodhoo for the daily-news podcast “Axios Today.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2021-22 budget blueprint would direct billions in state covid assistance to schools, businesses and the state’s vaccination effort. But he didn’t propose more funding for the state's 61 local health agencies, which have taken on increased responsibility for testing, contact tracing and enforcement of health orders.

Con el control del Senado y la Cámara de Representantes, tendrán el poder de elegir qué propuestas de salud se votarán en el Congreso. Pero no será tan fácil.

With a majority too small to eliminate the filibuster, Democrats will not have enough votes in the Senate to pass many of their plans without Republicans and will also have only a razor-thin majority in the House. This combination could doom many Democratic health care proposals, like offering Americans a government-sponsored public insurance option, and complicate efforts to pass further pandemic relief.

Former health care executive Wendell Potter said, “What I used to do for a living was mislead people into thinking that we had the best health care system in the world.” Now, Potter is a health care whistleblower and spent part of 2020 publishing high-profile apologies for the work he used to do.

T.K. Dutes — a former nurse who is now a radio host and podcast-maker — interviewed ‘An Arm and a Leg’ host Dan Weissmann about what he learned in 2020, and what’s ahead for the show.

A gynecologist in Carlsbad, New Mexico, tested the 60-year-old grandmother for various sexually transmitted infections without her knowledge. Her share of the lab fee was more than $3,000.

A long-debated measure to stop doctors, hospitals and other health care providers from billing patients for charges not covered by their insurance will gain congressional approval as part of the sweeping government spending package.

Congress seems on the verge of finishing a long-delayed COVID-19 relief bill, which will reportedly include neither of the things each party wanted most — for Republicans, liability protections; for Democrats, funding for states and localities. That bill is likely to be tied to a package to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year and, possibly, include a fix for “surprise” medical bills that patients receive when they inadvertently receive care outside their insurance network. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call and Mary Agnes Carey of KHN join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also this week, Rovner talks to Elizabeth Mitchell, president and CEO of the Pacific Business Group on Health, about the future of employer-provided health insurance.

Host Dan Weissmann gives us an inside look at his family’s quest to pick health insurance for next year. COVID-19 makes it more complicated.