Kaiser Health News
Health plans earning at least four stars qualify for federal bonus payments. Those that don't, lose out.
The head of Aetna Inc., the nation's third-largest health insurer, said he supports insurance exchanges, even though he questioned their sustainability earlier this month and lost money in the marketplaces last year.
Most of the people running for president say they want to do something about the rising cost of prescription drugs. But most of their proposals probably won't work because they don't address the dynamics behind these price increases.
U.S. manufacturers of medical devices started 2016 with a windfall -- a two-year suspension of a controversial tax on their revenue.
Americans are divided about the idea of creating a single-payer government health insurance system, as Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed, but support shrinks when negative arguments are highlighted and alternatives are presented, according to a poll released Thursday.
Contradictory results between how patients view home health agencies and how the government rates them are hardly unusual. One in five agencies had clinical and patient ratings that differed by two stars or more, a Kaiser Health News analysis of government records shows.
More women with breast cancer -- and an increasing number without -- are choosing to have mastectomies over more breast-sparing procedures. And nearly half don't spend a single night in the hospital but go home the same day, new government data show.
About 500,000 women give birth each year in rural hospitals, yet access to labor and delivery units has been declining. Comprehensive figures are spotty, but an analysis of 306 rural hospitals in nine states with large rural populations found that 7.2 percent closed their obstetrics units between 2010 and 2014.
The military's health program falls significantly short in providing mental health care to active service members, according to a RAND Corp. study published Thursday.
As superbug outbreaks raised alarm across the country last year, a prominent doctor at a Philadelphia cancer center wrote in a leading medical journal about how to reduce the risk of these often-deadly patient infections.