“Low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden. He had NOTHING to do with it.” Former President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post, June 8 Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that he — and not President Joe Biden — deserves credit for lowering older Americans’ prescription drug prices, specifically for insulin. In a June 8 post on Truth Social, the former president’s social platform, Trump wrote: “Low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked...
Kaiser Health News
The Tennessee government has agreed to begin scrubbing its sex offender registry of dozens of people who were convicted of prostitution while having HIV, reversing a practice that federal lawsuits have challenged as draconian and discriminatory. For more than three decades, Tennessee’s “aggravated prostitution” laws have made prostitution a misdemeanor for most sex workers but a felony for those who are HIV-positive. Tennessee toughened penalties in 2010 by reclassifying prostitution with HIV as a “violent sexual offense” with a lifetime registration as a sex offender — even if protection is u...
Kaiser Health News
Just after lunchtime on June 18, Massachusetts’ leaders discovered that the statewide 911 system was down. A scramble to handle the crisis was on. Police texted out administrative numbers that callers could use, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu gave outage updates at a press conference outlining plans for the Celtics’ championship parade, and local officials urged people to summon help by pulling red fire alarm boxes. About 7 million people went roughly two hours with no 911 service. Such crashes have become more of a feature than a bug in the nation’s fragmented emergency response system. Outages hav...
Kaiser Health News
Caitlyn Mai woke up one morning in middle school so dizzy she couldn’t stand and deaf in one ear, the result of an infection that affected one of her cranial nerves. Though her balance recovered, the hearing never came back. Growing up, she learned to cope — but it wasn’t easy. With only one functioning ear, she couldn’t tell where sounds were coming from. She couldn’t follow along with groups of people in conversation — at social gatherings or at work — so she learned to lip-read. For many years, insurers wouldn’t approve cochlear implants for single-sided deafness due to concerns that it wou...
Kaiser Health News
Hospital facility fees. They can feel like a charge just for walking in the door. Hospitals say they go toward overhead on facilities with lots of specialized equipment and staff, like emergency rooms. But these fees have grown and become more common in recent years. And as hospitals buy up outpatient facilities, patients are starting to get charged facility fees for routine tests, procedures, and visits to the doctor’s office. In this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with Georgann Boatright, a retired speech pathologist from Oxford, Mississippi, who was told by her loc...
Kaiser Health News
The largest private company that brokers use to enroll people in Affordable Care Act health plans said it’s joining with insurers to thwart unauthorized Obamacare sign-ups and plan switches. HealthSherpa, which has its own sales team, announced the new initiative — called “Member Defense Network” — July 16. It will cut off commissions for unscrupulous insurance brokers believed to be signing up thousands of Americans for health plans they don’t need or switching their coverage without express consent. Federal regulators say at least 90,000 Obamacare customers have complained about unauthorized...
Kaiser Health News
During the Republican National Convention’s opening night, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) spoke to Fox News for his first interview as former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Sitting in the Fiserv Forum, the convention’s Milwaukee venue, Vance took questions from host Sean Hannity and addressed criticism about his previous comments on domestic violence, abortion, and his 2016 disapproval of Trump. A couple of times, Vance accused the media of twisting controversial comments about violent marriages and abortion exemptions. We took a closer look at four of his claims. Vance Mischara...
Kaiser Health News
The first time Tammy and Jordan Myers held their twins, the premature babies were so fragile that their tiny faces were mostly covered by oxygen masks and tubing. Their little hands rested gently on Tammy’s chest as the machines keeping them alive in a neonatal intensive care unit in Grand Rapids, Michigan, beeped and hummed around them. It was an incredible moment, but also a terrifying one. A court had just denied the Myers’ parental rights to the twins, who were born via surrogate using embryos made from Jordan’s sperm and Tammy’s eggs. (Tammy’s eggs had been frozen before she underwent tre...
Kaiser Health News
HOUSTON — As Tina Kitzmiller sat inside her sweltering apartment, windows and doors open in the hope of catching even the slightest breeze, she was frustrated and worried for her dog and her neighbors. It had been days since Hurricane Beryl blew ashore from the Gulf of Mexico on July 8, causing widespread destruction and knocking out power to more than 2 million people, including the Houston senior independent living facility where Kitzmiller lives. Outdoor temperatures had reached at least 90 degrees most days, and the heat inside the building was stifling. Kitzmiller moved there not long ago...
Kaiser Health News
Five people who work at a poultry farm in northeastern Colorado have tested positive for the bird flu, the Colorado public health department reported July 14. This brings the known number of U.S. cases to nine. The five people were likely infected by chickens, which they had been tasked with killing in response to a bird flu outbreak at the farm. More than 99 million chickens and turkeys have been infected with a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu that emerged at U.S. poultry farms in early 2022. Since then, the federal government has compensated poultry farmers more than $1 billion for ...
Kaiser Health News
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