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Hearing aids may help older adults combat social isolation

Providing hearing aids and advice on their use may preserve social connections that often wane as we age, a new study shows.

12 May 2025

Medicaid payments barely keep hospital mental health units afloat. Federal cuts could sink them.

This town's hospital is a holdout on behalf of people going through mental health crises. The facility's leaders have pledged not to shutter their inpatient psychiatric unit, as dozens of other U.S. hospitals have.

12 May 2025

An Arm and a Leg: A health policy veteran puts 2025 in perspective

News has been coming out of Washington, D.C., since the start of the second Donald Trump administration like water out of a fire hose. It can feel impossible to stay on top of all the changes.

12 May 2025

Sen. Ron Wyden seeks answers on RFK Jr.’s purge of FOIA staff

The Department of Health and Human Services' mass dismissals of workers who release government records "raise grave transparency, accountability, and privacy concerns," Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said Thursday.

8 May 2025

Seeking spending cuts, GOP lawmakers target a tax hospitals love to pay

On the eastern plains of Colorado, in a county of less than 6,000 people, Lincoln Health runs the only hospital within a 75-minute drive. The facility struggles financially, given its small size and the area's tiny population.

8 May 2025

NIH and CMS launch partnership to build real world health data platform

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced a landmark partnership to enable NIH to build a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables.

7 May 2025

NCCN hosts Oncology Policy Summit to bridge primary and cancer care

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network hosted an Oncology Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., today, focused on improving care coordination between primary care and oncology providers.

6 May 2025

Retail pharmacies excluded from Medicare Part D networks at higher risk of closure

Retail pharmacies excluded from Medicare Part D networks maintained by drug benefits middlemen were much more likely to close over the past decade, according to new research from USC published in Health Affairs.

6 May 2025

At Social Security, these are the days of the living dead

Rennie Glasgow, who has served 15 years at the Social Security Administration, is seeing something new on the job: dead people.

6 May 2025

Breakthrough brain training shows promise for Long COVID recovery

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have identified what is believed to be the first intervention found in a randomized controlled trial to show large and very large improvements in multiple symptoms associated with Long COVID, and to result in people debilitated by those symptoms returning to work.

5 May 2025

Medicaid unwinding may have put opioid recovery care at risk

The massive national effort to return the Medicaid enrollment process to its pre-pandemic rules starting in April 2023 may have disrupted the care of people receiving treatment for opioid addiction, a new University of Michigan study suggests.

3 May 2025

Medicaid rollbacks could deepen health inequities

A new analysis provides evidence that reductions in access to Medicaid could increase deaths and cause financial hardship to people currently covered under an expansion of Medicaid that was implemented under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

2 May 2025

Study shows safe outcomes for PCI performed in ambulatory surgery centers

The first study evaluating Medicare patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) demonstrated good safety outcomes, such as mortality and adverse event rates at 30 days, compared to outpatient hospital departments, but were less likely to use certain technologies.

2 May 2025

Government watchdog expects Medicaid work requirement analysis by fall

The country's top nonpartisan government watchdog has confirmed it is examining the costs of running the nation's only active Medicaid work requirement program, as Republican state and federal lawmakers consider similar requirements.

2 May 2025

KFF Health News' 'What the Health?': 100 days of health policy upheaval

Members of Congress are back in Washington this week, and Republicans are facing hard decisions on how to reduce Medicaid spending, even as new polling shows that would be unpopular among their voters.

1 May 2025

Psychotherapy gains ground in outpatient mental health care

Psychotherapy assumed a larger role in outpatient mental health care while psychiatric medication without psychotherapy became less common, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

1 May 2025

Health care providers working together as ACOs save Medicare billions over long term

Teams of health care providers called Accountable Care Organizations participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program have saved Medicare between $4.1 billion and $8.1 billion from 2012 through 2019, according to a new study from Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

28 Apr 2025

CommunityRx program reduces ER visits for food insecure children

In a new clinical study published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine found that a low-intensity program that "prescribes" community resources to every parent or other primary caregiver of a hospitalized child reduced the use of acute care for children of food-insecure families in the following year, saving potentially thousands of dollars in healthcare expenditures while demanding little more than minutes of staff time per family.

28 Apr 2025

Medicare changes set to lower out-of-pocket costs for cancer medications

Even for patients covered by Medicare, annual out-of-pocket costs for lifesaving cancer treatments taken in pill form have often exceeded $10,000-until recently.

28 Apr 2025

New Medicare changes ease cost burden for cancer drugs

Even for patients covered by Medicare, annual out-of-pocket costs for lifesaving cancer treatments taken in pill form have often exceeded $10,000-until recently.

25 Apr 2025