Kaiser Health News, Cost & Quality Blog

Two drug implants are nearly identical. The one for children has a list price of $37,300. For adults, the list price is $4,400. One dad fought for his daughter to be able to use the cheaper drug.

This claim ‘wouldn’t pass muster’ in a first-year statistics class.

Until very recently, the separate company that runs the emergency department at Nashville General Hospital in Tennessee was continuing to haul patients who couldn't pay medical bills into court.

There was a time when Bloomberg’s criticism was consistent.

Surprise bills are just the latest weapons in a decades-long war among health care industry players over who gets to keep the fortunes generated each year from patient illness: $3.6 trillion in 2018. The practice is an outrage, yet no one in the health care sector wants to unilaterally make the type of big concessions that would change things.

Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health care policy stories each week, so you don't have to.

For this bonus episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” Dan Weissmann gives up the host’s chair and answers questions from reporter and colleague Sally Herships.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget includes billions of dollars in health spending cuts, Congress gets back to work on surprise medical bills, and health care remains a top issue for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), a former Health and Human Services secretary, joins the panel at a special taping before a live audience in Washington, D.C. Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call and Joanne Kenen of Politico join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more.

While Missouri has yet to have a confirmed case of coronavirus, the threat of the disease is siphoning resources from an already stretched-thin public health system.

Caveat emptor. Some of these health insurance plans might prove helpful for some people, but making that determination is not easy.

Scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are trashed each year and many more become critically delayed while being shipped on commercial airliners, a new investigation finds.

Happy Friday! In news that is technically really good and exciting but is also kind of icky: yarn made from human skin could eventually be used to stitch up surgical wounds as a way to cut down on detrimental reactions from patients. As CNN reports, “The researchers say their ‘human textile,’ which they developed from […]

The Affordable Care Act requires that insurers cover birth control with no out-of-pocket costs, but the enforcement mechanism is weak and a pending court case could add further complications.

Insurance companies often require patients to have medical procedures, devices, tests and even some medicines preapproved to ensure the insurers are willing to cover the costs. But that doesn’t guarantee they’ll end up paying. Some patients are getting stuck with unexpected bills after the medical service has been provided.

Insurance giant Cigna and San Francisco-based Dignity Health have failed to ink a 2020 contract, leaving nearly 17,000 patients in California and Nevada scrambling to find new health care providers. Meanwhile, Dignity faces financial and legal challenges while it strives to implement its merger with Catholic Health Initiatives, which created one of the nation’s largest Catholic hospital systems.

We checked again. The data has not changed.

If you’re told Medicare’s home health benefits have changed, don’t believe it: Coverage rules haven’t been altered and people are still entitled to the same types of services. All that has changed is how Medicare pays agencies.

Doctors and other clinicians say they're enduring moral injury because the business of health care interferes with patient care.

Medicare has changed how it pays for services. In response, agencies across the country are firing therapists, limiting physical, occupational and speech therapy, and terminating services for some longtime, severely ill patients.

Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health care policy stories each week, so you don't have to.