Health and Fitness Tips

Alzheimer’s Researchers Look at an Unusual Data Point: Head Shape

Could the geometry of our brains increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease? It’s a provocative question, but one that some scientists are beginning to explore.

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‘Go to Canada’: Trump Touted Americans’ Access to Cheaper Drugs. A New Rule Threatens It.

Days before it was to go into effect, the Trump administration pushed back a U.S. customs rule threatening the supply of vital prescription drugs imported by millions of Americans.

Under the rule, Customs and Border Protection and the FDA will require coding on packages that makes it easier to know what’s in them. It is aimed at collecting tariffs on even low-value imports, and at catching illegal drugs like fentanyl. It will also add costs and complex paperwork to each order.

Now the regulation, which was set to start Oct. 22, is delayed until Jan. 20.

While it is illegal to import most FDA-approved prescription drugs, the U.S. has allowed Americans to import legal medications in small quantities for personal use since 2003. The FDA rarely inspects the parcels.

“The information we have is there’s going to be a complete shutdown on Oct. 22,” Tim Smith, general manager of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association, said in an interview in early October. The 51 licensed retail pharmacies in his organization urged their hundreds of thousands of U.S. customers to file extra orders before Oct. 9 to be sure as many medications as possible arrived before the clampdown, Smith said.

“These are people in every case who have gone to the doctor, gotten a prescription for whatever, gone to the pharmacy to fill the order, seen how expensive it’s going to be, and then looked for an alternative,” he said. “Those are the people who’ve been coming to us for years.”

As Donald Trump campaigned in 2016, allowing people to import drugs was part of his platform. In his first term, President Trump let states buy cheaper drugs from Canada. He told Floridians at 2020 rallies that their state could “go to Canada” to obtain drugs for them.

But while Florida and Colorado joined the importation program, neither state has brought in any drugs yet.

Patients have, however, and they flooded authorities with at least 109,000 letters urging the FDA to clarify that the rule won’t stop personal-use drug shipments, said Ken Hunter, executive director of the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation. And Trump ally Laura Loomer called the rule a case of stupidity or sabotage, under a headline that asked, “So Why Is Someone in His Administration Trying To Make Prescription Drugs More Expensive Before The Midterms?”

Seventy-one congressional Democrats signed an Oct. 1 petition led by Reps. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin to warn about the potential impact of the rule. Three House Republicans from Florida wrote separately to CBP and the FDA, noting that Floridians, unlike Americans in Northern states, can’t easily drive to Canada to buy medicine.

By cutting off imports, Hunter said, “they are going to lose millions, maybe billions in tariff revenue.”

“Why would you want to cut off this massive revenue source?” he asked. “Why would they want to cut people off from lifesaving medications two weeks before midterms?”

Pressure by advocacy groups may have led the agency to back off, said Lucia Mueller, president of PharmacyChecker, which helps patients find legitimate pharmacies to obtain cheaper drugs.

“Loomer’s political argument is sound,” she told KFF Health News. “We know she’s had Trump’s ear before.”

The agency’s Oct. 14 news release on the delay said it would help “avoid disruptions to certain international postal shipments.” It didn’t specifically refer to drug imports.

“This is an important short-term success,” said Gabriel Levitt, founder of Prescription Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for more-affordable drugs. “However, the underlying threat to personal prescription drug importation remains, and the next 90 days will be critical.”

A 2020 study found that 2.3 million Americans regularly imported medications from abroad, and some surveys show much higher numbers. About 4 in 10 Americans in a recent KFF survey said cost had led them to not take medications as prescribed over the past year.

When he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation years ago, Leslie Waters learned that a 90-day supply of the blood thinner Eliquis, or apixaban, would cost $486. “Holy crap!” said the retired computer scientist, who said he lives off a monthly $1,886 Social Security check. Waters, of San Jose, California, learned about the Canada option on the internet and has been buying 90-day supplies from a pharmacy there for $57, including shipping.

Under previous administrations, orders worth $800 or less weren’t taxed or saddled with extensive paperwork. The new rule will require shippers of even low-value international parcels to transmit detailed information about their contents to CBP, along with tariff payments, which must be transmitted through a licensed customer broker.

Zonos, a U.S.-based company that handles logistics for mail from Canada and other countries, told clients in early September that its understanding was that CBP would no longer allow in personal prescription drug packages after the rule took effect, said Smith, of the Canadian pharmacy trade group. In an Oct. 6 webinar, Zonos senior broker Angela Macke said that the company would continue to ship the drugs but that it didn’t know whether the agencies would let them reach patients.

The pharmacy announcements have frightened thousands of customers, said Bill Hepscher, whose company, Canadian Medstore, has six Florida storefronts that help patients import drugs.

“It’s really been hair on fire,” he said. “I could spend my entire day fielding phone calls from people saying: ‘Can I no longer get my Eliquis? I could have a blood clot or stroke!’”

Hepscher said about half his clients buy their drugs from Canada, with many of the others buying from Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., or Turkey. He said 2025 was his company’s busiest year ever — changes to Medicare drug plans and increased enrollment in high-deductible Affordable Care Act plans had led seniors and younger people facing higher costs and copays to seek Canadian drugs.

“I only have 23 days’ worth of pills,” Roland Hofferber told KFF Health News in early October. The retired supply chain engineer in Muscatine, Iowa, takes Jardiance, also known as empagliflozin, to slow his chronic kidney disease. “If I don’t get some through pretty soon, I’m going to have to cut back or quit.”

The drug would cost him $641 for three months in the U.S., he said. He buys a generic from an Indian pharmacy for $54.

The FDA “hasn’t given parameters as to what they will approve and what they won’t,” Zonos’ Macke said during the webinar. “We’ve been told there will not be a general ban. But we cannot reassure U.S. patients. We have to see how FDA applies. They could be lenient. They could be very strict.”

When asked whether patients could still import prescription medicines, CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner said that pharmaceuticals remained under the FDA’s jurisdiction and that the FDA “will continue to determine whether imported medication shipments are admissible.” Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the FDA would “continue to evaluate personal imports on a case-by-case basis.”

White House spokesperson Allison Schuster did not respond to questions about imports but said Trump “remains dedicated to lowering the cost of prescription drugs.”

Since summer 2025, patients have had to pay tariffs on brand-name medicine shipments. In 2022, the FDA said it typically checked about 1 in 2,000 medication packages passing through U.S. customs.

“A lot of products weren’t even looked at, because CBP and FDA didn’t have full visibility” into what entered the country, Prescription Justice’s Levitt said. The rule requires shippers to post a bond and fill in a complex data form for each package, he noted.

“Let’s say you’re importing 90 days’ worth of Eliquis,” Levitt said. “FDA can now look on a screen and see that. Do they let it in, or refuse it under law?”

“If they don’t, there’s going to be a cohort of people who cannot afford their drugs anymore,” he said. “And those people are going to suffer.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Is Rabies Making a Comeback?

As several states report surges in animal cases, federal officials are warning about an apparent increase in human exposures.

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Inside the World of Dark Nutrition

More Americans are rejecting everything they’ve been taught about food.

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States Are Forcing Hospitals To Offer More People Financial Aid. In Oregon, It’s Working.

Four years ago, Oregon hospitals were under fire from state authorities and patient advocates. Hospitals, critics said, had made it too hard for patients to apply for and receive help paying their bills.

Within months, the state enacted a sweeping law that required hospitals to proactively screen patients and give financial aid to those who qualify for it. Oregon’s new rules, which took effect in July 2024, required hospitals to skip applications for nearly all patients — a rarity among hospitals nationwide.

“They will be told up front, Hey, we got you,” said Democratic Oregon state Sen. Lisa Reynolds, who introduced the legislation. “You are here at a very scary time in your life because of illness or injury, and we got your back.”

The law worked.

Oregon Health & Science University’s hospital, one of the largest in the state, saw 64% of its patients automatically qualify for financial assistance in the early months of the new law, up from 12% previously.

In their first full fiscal year under the law, spending by Oregon hospitals on financial assistance more than doubled, on average, according to federal financial reports from about two-thirds of the state’s hospitals. That’s compared with their last full year before the change.

For patients, the switch meant direct relief from high healthcare costs, advocates said.

“They don’t have to have the late nights being like, how am I going to afford my mortgage? How am I going to afford these medical bills?” said Adam Zarrin, a director of state government affairs for the advocacy group Blood Cancer United.

Hospitals in the state have pushed back on the requirements, saying they need better screening tools, and they face added financial strain from the Trump administration’s domestic policy agenda. Millions of people are projected to lose health insurance in coming years under cuts to Medicaid pushed through by Republicans in Congress.

Oregon’s early success is the first big test of a new approach that more states are turning to, known as presumptive eligibility. Hospitals skip the applications and screen patients automatically to determine if they qualify for aid.

North Carolina this year expanded its screening requirement to include patients with income up to triple the poverty line. California and Delaware are requiring hospitals to automatically grant financial aid by July 2027.

A Promising Tool To Prevent Medical Debt

As many as 100 million adults in the U.S. have healthcare debt, according to a KFF Health News analysis. That financial burden can alter people’s lives, forcing them to skip prescriptions and follow-up care to avoid further bills.

Hospitals are a major source of that debt, and they have faced growing scrutiny over their prices and billing practices.

Policymakers have focused specifically on nonprofit hospitals, which account for about half the sector. Nonprofit hospitals typically don’t pay taxes, in exchange for providing benefits to their communities — a vaguely defined standard under federal law. Many hospitals meet this requirement by providing free or discounted care to low-income patients.

That financial assistance, however, can be difficult to get. Applications can be onerous and confusing. Congress and state officials have spent years testing policies to promote the help and make it easier to receive, with mixed results.

Research finds hospital financial aid spending varies, as does the degree to which hospitals benefit by not paying property, sales, or income taxes.

“Hospitals have been on the winning side of this deal for a long time,” said Reynolds, the Oregon lawmaker. “They enjoy millions and millions and millions of dollars in tax breaks, and that money is supposed to be then spent on poor people who can’t afford their care or even their copayments. It has not penciled out.”

Reynolds pressed for Oregon’s screening requirement, she said, to hold hospitals “accountable for what they should have been doing all along.”

A woman with a red velvet blazer and patterned dress stands in front of a brick wall for a portrait — Lisa Reynolds, a pediatrician and Oregon state senator, pushed legislation to require Oregon hospitals to proactively screen nearly all patients for financial aid and provide it to those who are eligible. The law has led to a significant increase in the number of patients receiving assistance. (Kristina Barker for KFF Health News and Tradeoffs)

Early evidence suggests the law is doing what Reynolds hoped. Oregon hospitals’ spending on free and discounted care increased to 2.7% of all operating expenses, on average, from 1.4%, among the roughly two-thirds of hospitals with available federal data.

That brings hospitals in Oregon closer to the national average for nonprofit hospitals, which from 2021 to 2024 was about 2.4%, according to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University researcher Hossein Zare, who studies the industry.

More Help for the Insured

Among those in Oregon who started to get more help: patients with health insurance.

OHSU’s spending on help for insured patients reached about $39 million in the first year under the law, federal data shows, about five times as much as in previous years.

Lawrence Furnstahl, then OHSU’s chief financial officer, said in a public meeting in January 2025 that, before the law, insured patients often didn’t apply for help and instead paid their share of the bills. The new automatic screening often wiped out or reduced what they owed — including for large deductibles that patients have to meet out-of-pocket before insurance will kick in.

Patients who pay hospital bills often still carry medical debt, surveys show, because many use credit cards or loans from family, friends, or banks to afford their care.

A 2025 survey from the Commonwealth Fund found that 1 in 3 adults with private insurance have medical debt.

“It defies the purpose of health insurance coverage, which is to enable people to get healthcare when they need it and protect them from serious costs,” said Sara Collins, an economist and senior scholar with the Commonwealth Fund.

An image of a hospital building's emergency department entrance with cars outside — Oregon Health & Science University spent about $64 million on financial assistance in the first year of new state requirements to proactively screen patients for eligibility and award them help. “This is going to our patients,” said OHSU’s chief financial officer at the time, Lawrence Furnstahl, at a public meeting. “It is a good thing, but it is an expensive thing.” (Kristina Barker for KFF Health News and Tradeoffs)

‘A Very Different World’

For hospitals, the new requirements come as healthcare costs are climbing and federal support for the safety net is shrinking. Nationally, an estimated 14 million more people will be uninsured in 2034 as a result of President Donald Trump’s signature tax-and-domestic-spending law and the expiration of enhanced Obamacare subsidies that Republican lawmakers allowed to lapse at the end of last year.

Hospitals supported Oregon’s new presumptive eligibility law, said Sean Kolmer, an executive vice president for the Hospital Association of Oregon. But they’re feeling more financial pressure, with the organization expecting the state’s uninsured rate to climb to 10% or higher in coming years, he said, up from about 3% before Oregon’s screening law passed.

“That’s a very different world,” he said.

OHSU saw costs rise rapidly. “It is a good thing, but it is an expensive thing,” Furnstahl said in a public meeting as he gave an update on the first months under the law.

In the first year under the new law, OHSU spent about $64 million on free and discounted care — about 1% of what it spent on operations that year.

The true cost of more up-front screening is hard to quantify, medical debt experts said. It must also take into account how many people would have never paid their bills anyway and how much hospitals save by not chasing payments.

Lawmakers said hospitals pressed them for relief, and in April, Oregon enacted a new law to ease the state’s screening requirement.

The original law required hospitals to screen everyone on Medicaid or who was uninsured and anyone who owed $500 or more. Lawmakers raised the monetary screening threshold for a single visit to $1,500. The Medicaid or uninsured requirement remains.

Reynolds, who spearheaded the original law, was unsympathetic to hospitals’ cost concerns. But she agreed to the rollback because she wanted hospitals to have some relief as they fine-tuned their screening process. Oregon hospitals reported that their screening data was less accurate for patients with higher incomes, leading some people who didn’t qualify for help to receive financial assistance.

OHSU studied economic data for Oregon’s residents and reported that about 57% likely had incomes that qualified them for its financial assistance, slightly under the 64% of patients who were receiving help.

Hospitals’ warning of increasing financial stress was a motivator for Democratic Rep. Rob Nosse, who chairs the healthcare committee in the Oregon House of Representatives.

“I don’t want any suburban or rural hospitals to close on my watch,” Nosse said.

People who are no longer automatically eligible can still apply for help with bills less than $1,500, he said.

“I’ve got to make it more expensive for someone to get healthcare so that the hospitals can stay in business,” he added. “What a country.”

This article is part of “Hidden Help,” an investigative series from Tradeoffs and KFF Health News about how hospitals can protect their patients from the life-altering harms of medical debt.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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New Arrivals in the ER? Georgia Gears Up To Solve Rural Maternal Health Crisis

LAVONIA, Ga. — It had been a decade since Kara Holden last had a baby. But as the former obstetric nurse prepared for her fourth child, her head was swimming with contingency plans.

The labor and delivery unit where she used to work in this rural northeastern Georgia community is no longer open. So, she asked former co-workers to be on standby around her anticipated due date. She and her midwife mapped out emergency rooms along the more-than-50-mile trek to the hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, where she planned to give birth. And, to prepare for a worst-case scenario, she curated items to keep in the car in case she went into labor en route.

“That’s a horrible place to put a pregnant woman in,” said Holden, who on Oct. 11 made the painful, hourlong trip to Greenville Memorial Hospital to deliver her son Tucker.

Holden lives roughly midway between Athens and Greenville, two of the nearest cities with labor and delivery units. Owing partly to Medicaid cuts from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia stopped providing obstetric services nearly a year ago. Its closure is part of a trend touching rural communities nationwide. From South Dakota to Alabama and from Ohio to California, low Medicaid reimbursement and dwindling birth rates are pushing hospitals to shutter these services. Today, fewer than half of rural hospitals offer labor and delivery services.

A newborn baby in a sage green jumper lays on a hospital baby bed. — Kara Holden welcomed her fourth child, Tucker, on Oct. 11. Holden lives roughly midway between Athens, Georgia, and Greenville, South Carolina, two of the nearest cities with labor and delivery units. She traveled more than 50 miles to Greenville Memorial Hospital to give birth. (Kara Holden)

In Georgia, only 36% of rural hospitals have a labor and delivery unit, and four have closed since 2020, according to data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

To address the challenge the closings pose to patients seeking care, the state — which ranks among the worst in the nation for maternal health outcomes — has turned to federal money from the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program. This fund was created by congressional Republicans to offset concerns about the outsize fallout Trump’s signature legislation would have in rural communities.

More than $12 million — out of the nearly $219 million approved for Georgia in the program’s first year — will be allocated toward placing obstetric carts in 43 rural hospitals without labor and delivery units. The carts will be outfitted with supplies needed for a birth or obstetric emergency. For example, they’ll have neonatal resuscitation tools, thermal blankets, and essential medications such as oxytocin, which stimulates contractions, and magnesium sulfate, used to treat seizures in pregnant people with high blood pressure.

The delivery carts sound fine, in theory, said Justin Peterson, an OB-GYN who practices in southern Georgia and has seen the pressures rural health institutions face providing maternal care.

Like Holden, Peterson worries that the carts, while helpful, will put supplies in the hands of ER doctors lacking extensive obstetric experience. Instead, he wants the state to fill coverage gaps by investing more to prevent the closure of labor and delivery units in rural areas.

“You’re putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage,” he said.

The entry sign to St. Mary's Sacred Heart Hospital. A lush green lawn surrounds a large white sign. — St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia, Georgia, stopped providing labor and delivery services in October 2025. Hospital leadership cited Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the final straw. (Briah Lumpkins/KFF Health News)

‘Can’t Practice Scared’

Brittany Mitchell was about seven months pregnant when Sacred Heart’s labor and delivery unit closed. She was reassigned to an OB-GYN in Athens, even though the nearly 50-mile drive from Lavonia was stressful and inconvenient.

That OB-GYN wanted to see Mitchell weekly after finding high levels of protein in her urine — a warning sign of preeclampsia, which can cause organ damage, seizures, and other complications. To make it to those prenatal appointments, she routinely gave up a day of work as a home health aide, a job she said already didn’t pay much.

But if Mitchell were to have another baby, she said, she’d still prefer to drive to Athens to see an OB-GYN than be treated by an ER doctor. When she had her first child nine years ago, the local OB-GYN had to act quickly when her daughter briefly lost oxygen.

“If they were in that situation,” she wondered of ER doctors, “would they know how to do all that?”

In written responses to KFF Health News, Lauren Williams, director of communications for the Georgia Department of Community Health, said that training ER medical staff is the main goal of the obstetric cart initiative. The rollout will include simulation drills, during which ER staff will practice high-risk procedures.

The Georgia Hospital Association will procure and distribute the carts. When exactly that will happen is unknown, but the grant funding must be spent by Sept. 30, 2027, said Anna Adams, the organization’s chief government relations officer.

The concept of obstetric carts is great, said Justin Law, an emergency doctor with SouthlandMD, a physician-owned and -operated healthcare management and staffing company. Most items planned for the carts are already available in ERs. But having them in one organized spot will be helpful, he said.

Still, while ER doctors are more frequently positioned at the front lines as labor and delivery closures persist, advocates argue that they shouldn’t be used as a stopgap in obstetric care.

In the decade he’s worked across rural Georgia, Law said, he’s never delivered a baby in the ER even though he’s trained in emergency obstetrics and has experience delivering babies as a paramedic. When a mother needs an emergency cesarean section or has another high-risk complication, she would likely be transferred to a hospital with labor and delivery capabilities, Law said.

Holden, the former obstetric nurse, said familiarity with obstetric delivery practices and procedures is essential because some complications can’t wait for a transfer. “You’re not going to save anybody’s life just because you got access to some equipment,” she said.

Adams understands the concerns and acknowledged that the ER is not the ideal location for delivering a baby. “But sometimes things happen that are outside of our control,” she said. “And when it does, we want to make sure those hospitals are prepared.”

Robin Clyatt, maternal health community outreach coordinator for Hope for Georgia Moms, said ER doctors have vast knowledge. But they might see someone with a major maternal health complication, such as a hemorrhage, only a few times a year, and therefore may lack the skills to act immediately, she said.

“You can’t practice scared when it comes to obstetrics,” Clyatt said. “And that’s important, because when you practice scared, you do stupid things.”

A pregnant woman leans over to adjust baby clothes on a hanger. — When Holden was pregnant with her other children, the OB-GYN was only a five-minute drive away. But after the local hospital cut its labor and delivery service, she took extra precautions to ensure she was logistically prepared for the arrival of “baby Tucker.” (Briah Lumpkins/KFF Health News)

Vintage trinkets and family heirlooms adorn the shelves of a nursery room. — Holden adorned a nursery with vintage trinkets and family heirlooms in anticipation of the arrival of Tucker. (Briah Lumpkins/KFF Health News)

Ways To Keep Access

The labor and delivery unit at the Coffee Regional Medical Center in Douglas serves six counties in southern Georgia. The number of live births there increased from 551 in 2020 to nearly 1,000 in 2024, which shows the impact when nearby facilities close, said Peterson, who practices at the Coffee Regional Hospital Women’s Center.

While he understands that hospitals must consider their bottom lines, business decisions in recent years have often taken precedence over patient care, he said.

“They just say, ‘Oh, you know, the numbers aren’t there. We’re closing,’” he said, adding that when rural labor and delivery units shutter, the chance they’ll reopen is small.

Mark Ralston, public relations manager for St. Mary’s Health Care System, which owns Sacred Heart, did not respond to multiple requests to further discuss the unit’s closure. But in its announcement, the system said the decision followed “an extensive 18-month discernment process that included intensive efforts to recruit additional physicians, create new partnerships, and pursue incremental funding sources.”

Nationwide, states are attempting to narrow gaps in maternal healthcare using federal funds. South Dakota will establish maternal health hubs to determine where resources are needed and help mothers navigate the health system. Ohio is establishing birth centers in rural communities.

In its proposal for federal rural transformation money, Georgia included incentives such as funding 75 new residency slots in various specialties and creating a grant program that would reimburse physicians up to $250,000 in relocation fees if they chose to practice in rural areas.

State legislators could incentivize doctors to stay in rural areas, offer higher reimbursement rates for hospitals, and provide loan forgiveness for physicians, Peterson said. Communities should also look to incorporate certified midwives and community health workers, Holden and Clyatt said, though state law makes it difficult for both groups to practice. Currently, certified nurse midwives are allowed to practice only in partnership with a physician, which maternal health advocates argue creates a steep financial burden.

Holden had the ability to send her vitals to her doctor and meet with them virtually for prenatal care.

As she adorned bookshelves in baby Tucker’s cozy, sage-green nursery with vintage trinkets and family heirlooms, she said she thought of less-resourced mothers in the area, who may be on Medicaid or not have the luxury to travel an hour for a prenatal appointment.

Holden worries that without prenatal care, conditions like preeclampsia could go undiagnosed more often. “They don’t make it, and their baby doesn’t make it, because they never got that diagnosed and managed,” she said.

People like to remain optimistic that everything will go as planned, but “there are so many things that can go wrong,” she said. “And they can go wrong really quick.”

The town entry sign for Lavonia, GA. It is a white wooden sign posted in lush green grass. — Lavonia is a small city near the Georgia-South Carolina border. The local St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital stopped providing obstetric services in October 2025, citing Medicaid cuts. Two of the nearest cities with labor and delivery units are each about an hour away. (Briah Lumpkins/KFF Health News)

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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As Politicians Argue About China, US Patients Find Cutting-Edge Treatment There

Until recently, a Manhattanite might venture no more than a few dozen blocks to find the world’s most sophisticated cancer treatment. Cutting-edge American medicines have helped reduce the U.S. cancer death rate by about a third since 1990, and New York City hospitals deliver some of the best care in the country.

But in January 2025, the city’s health systems had no good options for Debbie Doppelt, a 60-year-old jeweler with an unusual form of lung cancer that mostly afflicts nonsmokers like her. The Food and Drug Administration hadn’t yet approved sunvozertinib, a drug developed in China that targets the mutation driving Doppelt’s tumors. She had been through chemotherapy and surgery, but the cancer had now spread to her brain. And she didn’t qualify for the relevant clinical trials.

Then an option emerged, in an offhand remark.

“Too bad she’s not Chinese,” a doctor told her son Max Doppelt, who had organized his mother’s care since her 2023 diagnosis. “She could go to a pharmacy in China and buy it.”

Within hours, mother and son had reached out to friends and relatives, one of whom procured a small supply of sunvozertinib from a contact living in China. A few months later, Max flew to Shanghai to get a refill.

Other patients have followed. “No organization or doctor is guiding patients to China, but word gets out,” Max said. He said he knows of at least 30 Americans who’ve made the pilgrimage to obtain the drug, which the FDA licensed in July 2025 but wasn’t yet on the U.S. market as of mid-October of this year.

A photo of Max Doppelt with his mother, Debbie. — Max Doppelt has organized care for his mother, Debbie Doppelt, since her cancer diagnosis in 2023. (The Doppelt family)

Sunvozertinib, made by Shanghai-based Dizal Pharmaceutical, isn’t the only treatment drawing patients to China. Americans, Europeans, and others are trekking there to enter clinical trials for CAR-T therapy, an area in which China is now a world leader.

China, until recently known more as a supplier of drug precursor chemicals and generic medicines, has become a biotech powerhouse, accounting for as much as 46% of new drugs tested around the world in 2025. U.S. pharmaceutical companies are testing new therapies there and signing billion-dollar contracts with Chinese firms to develop and market their drugs.

China’s progress has alarmed some politicians, who warn of lost jobs and U.S. dependency on Chinese medicines. The Trump administration in June kicked off Operation TrialBlazer, aimed at speeding up some FDA regulatory processes to lure back more clinical trials.

China’s poor showing in vaccine and drug development during the covid pandemic prompted the country to overhaul its biotech sector, dramatically altering the global industry, said Sam Rasty, a veteran of small biotech companies who now leads one called FynderBio. Venture capital now flows heavily to early-stage clinical work in China and Australia, where regulatory systems enable key first-in-human studies much more quickly than in the United States.

Chinese companies are so much faster at this process that U.S. biotechs, which used to share early advances at conferences or funding meetings, now routinely conceal their progress out of fear that competitors will take their ideas and speed them to market, said Steve Potts, CEO of Breakthru Medicine, a small biotech.

At a meeting he attended in May, nearly all the 60 biotech CEOs in the room planned to run phase 1 trials in Australia, Europe, or China, Potts said. Five or 10 years ago, most of those trials would have been carried out in the U.S.

“Slow and prohibitive” FDA requirements are driving investment to more-nimble Chinese companies, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Heidi Overton, warned in her opening statement at her Sept. 24 confirmation hearing.

The movement of clinical trials overseas “should give pause to every American and those who serve on their behalf,” Overton said. “When we lose this advantage, we lose our health security. And when we lose our health security, we lose everything.”

Overton pledged to continue TrialBlazer, which mirrors Australian processes begun in 1991. It is aimed at accelerating clinical trials and approvals so patients do not feel compelled to seek treatment abroad, said Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard. It is sometimes legal to obtain medication abroad for personal use, but the FDA “cautions patients about potential safety and quality risks associated with treatments outside our regulatory system,” she added.

As the FDA moves to streamline drug development, members of Congress are trying to slow Chinese firms’ integration into U.S. biotech.

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in June co-sponsored legislation with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) requiring all U.S. pharmaceutical deals with Chinese companies to be cleared by the Treasury Department.

Others see biotech protectionism as misguided. China’s focus on improved medicines can only help us, said Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of RA Capital Management, which has Chinese investments in its biotech portfolio.

“We may be adversaries in many areas, but we’re not competing with them to cure cancer. We are collaborating with them to cure cancer,” he said. “There are things that are bigger enemies than any other nation on Earth.”

Cancer Knows No Boundaries

A minor but persistent cough led to the diagnosis of Debbie Doppelt’s cancer in late 2023. Chemo, immunotherapy, and surgery kept it at bay for months, but in December 2024, scans showed the cancer had spread to her brain, with 10 tiny tumors.

The FDA earlier that year had approved amivantamab, a drug that targeted the mutation driving Doppelt’s tumor, but Max was concerned about its toxicity. Also, several doctors he consulted told him that amivantamab might not penetrate brain tissue to fight cancer there.

Doppelt tried to enter a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she was a patient, for zipalertinib, another drug that targeted her mutation. But in January 2025, the Doppelts learned that a slight scarring on her lungs had rendered her ineligible for the study.

That left sunvozertinib, which gained approval in China in 2023. It was also being tested in the U.S., but only in late-stage trials in which half the subjects received chemotherapy only. That risk was a nonstarter for Doppelt, whose cancer had already outsmarted chemo.

So Max flew to Shanghai, returning with 26 boxes of sunvozertinib in his luggage. The drugs cost about $10,000, he said.

“Getting on the plane and bringing the medicine home felt like my life’s purpose,” Max said. “The data was so clear that this drug had significant efficacy in the brain. Anything else she might do, she might not last a year.”

On Sept. 1 of this year, AstraZeneca signed an agreement with Dizal to distribute the drug worldwide, and it plans to make it available in the U.S. by the start of 2027, spokesperson Tara Parsell said.

Doppelt, who runs a diamond business with her husband, has tried to stay positive and healthy, scarcely missing a day of work since her 2023 diagnosis. She said she’s grateful she has a loving community and the means to afford the best available therapies.

“I think I’ve been pretty successful at having, actually, an amazing three years,” she said. “In some ways a better three years, with all of it, than the three years before, because you’re so appreciative of everything.”

Doppelt’s parents were Holocaust survivors. “They were always saying: ‘This piece of bread tastes so good! Do you know what it is to be hungry?’”

Searching for help for his mother gave Max, a 30-year-old computer engineer, an idea for helping patients find the right treatment — which, in cases of advanced cancers, may be a clinical trial.

A year ago, he quit his tech job and started a company that uses artificial intelligence to combine data from research and drug company sites with a patient’s health records to help them find the right study.

Similar apps are being used to help drug companies and hospital systems increase the percentage of U.S. cancer patients who enter clinical treatment trials, currently at about 7%. This will also strengthen the U.S. drug industry, said Paradigm Health CEO Kent Thoelke, whose company offers an AI program designed to help hospitals and clinics enroll trial subjects.

About 300 patients have used Max’s app. So far his clients, whom he doesn’t charge, have all been lung cancer patients like his mom. Sunvozertinib seems to help about half those who take it, he said.

A 70-year-old woman whom Max had assisted got a six-month supply of the drug earlier this year from China, only to learn after three months that it wasn’t working. “My cancer had spread,” said the woman, whom KFF Health News agreed not to name, to protect sensitive health information.

‘I’ll Do Everything in Our Power’

Doppelt has done well on the drug. Some 19 months after starting on it, her cancer was still mostly kept at bay, with the help of a few radiation treatments and dose adjustments.

AstraZeneca’s plans to widely distribute sunvozertinib would mean no more trips to China. But Max had few illusions that the drug would work for his mom forever.

“She has a metastasizing cancer that will learn to bypass the drug,” he said. “At that point we’ll be dependent on the latest and greatest therapies. If they happen to be in China, I’ll do everything in our power to go there.”

At his Upper East Side apartment one recent afternoon, Max examined the current clinical trial outlook for his mother. He pulled up her profile on the app and scrolled down a list scoring available trial sites according to their fit and proximity.

“This one looks good,” he said, pointing to a clinical trial for firmonertinib, a drug China approved in 2021 that’s under study in the U.S. and elsewhere.

CAR-T therapy is another possibility, particularly a variety that the University of Colorado has developed to boost patients’ immunological attack on mutations like the ones driving Doppelt’s cancer.

But Kyle Concannon, a leader of the Colorado research team, said regulatory uncertainty has slowed his progress. As new tools enable sophisticated measures of things like toxicity and tissue distribution, they add time, cost, and risk to the therapy’s development. These technologies may be better at detecting possible harms, “which is good,” Concannon said, “but the alternative to a new medicine, with a natural disease like lung cancer, is the individuals will die from their disease.”

Max Doppelt and other patient advocates, while pushing for faster FDA processes, don’t want to rule out more Chinese medicine runs.

“When drugs are approved in China but not in the U.S., of course we will deploy the China option where necessary,” said Marcia Horn, CEO of the nonprofit International Cancer Advocacy Network. “Lives depend on it.”

Max would prefer to see the drugs his mother needs developed in the United States. But he, too, opposes any effort to freeze out the Chinese biotech industry.

The discovery of new life-preserving drugs “really brings us together,” he said. “We’re all humans at the end of the day.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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When Idaho Banned Abortion, OB-GYNs Fled. The Doctors Who Stayed Are Cracking.

From childbirth to miscarriages, women’s health care in the state has become increasingly dangerous.

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GOP Focuses on Fraud, Seeking To Redirect Voters’ Ire Over Healthcare Costs

Heading into the midterm elections, high healthcare costs rank among voters’ biggest concerns. But lately, there’s a twist giving the issue new momentum on campaign agendas: a focus on fraud in government health programs.

The administration of President Donald Trump has used claims of widespread wrongdoing to justify investigations, suspensions of billions of dollars in payments to states, and the cancellation of Affordable Care Act health coverage for hundreds of thousands of people.

The effort has opened a broader political fight over the extent of fraud and the administration’s response to it. Republicans say they’re safeguarding taxpayer dollars by going after bad actors. Democrats contend the administration has relied on insufficient evidence to target blue states and cut programs Republicans have long tried to shrink. Meanwhile, Trump’s pardons of executives convicted of healthcare fraud, administration moves to weaken some protections against abuses, and a high-profile error by Trump regulators stand in contrast with the administration’s proclaimed fraud-fighting goals.

The dispute is becoming a talking point for both parties leading up to the November election.

Republican candidates are trying to win voters’ confidence by emphasizing their efforts to halt what they say is the misuse of taxpayer dollars in federal health programs.

“Going after fraud gives Republicans a healthcare message when they would otherwise just be defending cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. The approach, he said, helps “blunt” those attacks.

Democrats, however, traditionally have an advantage on healthcare in general, with polls showing voters are more likely to trust them with such issues. Now Democrats are portraying Republicans’ fraud crackdown as a cover for the GOP’s weakening of safety net programs. But the GOP messaging could resonate at the ballot box.

About 44% of voters — and 54% of Republican voters — say say fraud in government programs is “extremely important” for candidates to talk about, according to a KFF poll conducted in mid-September, suggesting the fraud focus might be connecting with the GOP base. Such fraud is also the top issue rural Republican voters want candidates to talk about, based on a separate survey by KFF and the Associated Press.

It’s an issue that is hardly new, and government watchdogs have repeatedly documented fraud by health providers and brokers, as well as improper enrollment in government health programs. A report by the Government Accountability Office in March warned that the “sheer amount of payments in the Medicare program creates significant fraud risks.” And in a separate probe, GAO investigators were able to get subsidized insurance for fake ACA enrollees.

What has changed is the prominence the issue now occupies in national politics.

Administration’s Fraud Targets

Trump administration authorities have this year charged hundreds of people, including doctors, in alleged billing schemes. It has announced audits of state Medicaid fraud units and increased scrutiny of enrollment in federal programs, withholding billions of dollars in federal Medicaid payments over claims of lax oversight — with what Democrats say is a laser focus on blue states despite a lack of evidence.

The administration’s more expansive claims about fraud — and the actions it has taken in response — have generated fierce political clashes.

Most recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services canceled ACA enrollments covering 760,000 people. While Democrats have questioned the methods that found them to be fraudulent, federal officials said they included nonexistent consumers whose applications were submitted by brokers or agents who can earn commissions from insurers.

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said at a press event that the cancellations included people who had coverage through the ACA but hadn’t used it. He also said some had no Social Security numbers, calling that evidence of problems.

“About 35% of current people on the Obamacare system — 35%, more than a third — had never used the program. They haven’t bought a prescription medication. They haven’t seen a doctor. That just is not possible,” Oz said. “So we know there is fraud.”

Democrats and some health policy analysts challenge that conclusion. They say that younger and healthier people are much less likely to use their insurance and that not using their coverage doesn’t mean they were improperly enrolled. Critics also say the absence of Social Security numbers doesn’t necessarily establish fraud; for example, newborns can be added to their parents’ plans before receiving a number.

“This is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to kick hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans off their healthcare,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) posted on the social media site X. “Millions are already struggling to access healthcare—and this is their plan?”

There are political risks for the GOP as well. The disenrollment of alleged phantom accounts is likely to ensnare legitimate consumers, say health analysts and ACA advocates, leading to a potential backlash against Republicans if scores of people lose coverage just before the midterm elections.

States that tend to deliver for GOP candidates will be hit especially hard, they say, because ACA enrollees are concentrated in those states. The 4.5 million people in Florida and 4.1 million in Texas who have marketplace coverage account for nearly 40% of the country’s ACA enrollment, according to a KFF analysis.

Conservative health policy advisers say the administration took multiple steps to avoid canceling legitimate coverage, including attempts to contact consumers and requirements that additional criteria be met before coverage was terminated.

“Those criticizing the action either don’t understand it or see some political advantage in mischaracterizing it,” said Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute and a former Trump health policy adviser.

Democrats, meanwhile, highlight inconsistencies in the administration’s broader anti-fraud campaign.

They note that the Department of Health and Human Services last year recertified hundreds of insurance brokers and agents who had been suspended in 2024 by the Biden administration for suspected fraud or abuse. The Trump administration also laid off about 200 employees from a CMS office involved in regional oversight of the ACA marketplace.

On Oct. 3, Trump called on Congress to pass legislation with mandatory prison terms for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, eliminating probation as an option.

But Trump has also pardoned health industry executives convicted of major fraud schemes, including people who are connected to his political allies or who spent heavily on lobbying on their behalf. The pardons included a nursing home operator sentenced to three years in prison for a nearly $40 million tax scheme and, in Trump’s first term, five executives at a Florida company convicted for Medicaid fraud.

Trump’s pardons in 2021 of executives who profited from massive public healthcare fraud spurred criticism from the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association. Critics now say the administration is portraying cuts to Medicare and Medicaid as necessary for weeding out waste, fraud, and abuse while exonerating criminals who have engaged in some of the biggest schemes in federal health programs.

Blue State Allegations

HHS has raised concerns about Medicaid fraud and program integrity in several states, and the administration has deferred or threatened to cut federal Medicaid funding while disputes are investigated.

Democrats say the administration is itself engaging in fraud by using unsubstantiated allegations of abuse to politically target blue states.

One of the most striking clashes occurred in New York.

Federal officials launched an investigation of the state’s Medicaid program after claiming that personal care services — including help with bathing, dressing, and meal preparation — had been provided to more than 5 million people, which would have amounted to roughly three-quarters of the state’s Medicaid population — an almost impossibly large proportion.

“It is time for New York to come clean about its Medicaid program,” CMS’ Oz posted in March on X.

CMS later acknowledged its calculations were wrong. The agency said that it had misunderstood the state’s billing codes and that the actual number of beneficiaries who received the services was closer to 450,000. The administration continued its scrutiny of the New York program, however, and later suspended millions of dollars in federal funding for the state’s Medicaid fraud unit, saying the division wasn’t producing enough indictments.

The administration also withheld about $2 billion in Medicaid funding from California, citing concerns about program integrity and oversight of some home medical services. State officials deny the allegations, saying spending on home services has grown because of factors such as higher wages for home health aides and an increase the number of older people receiving care.

The White House announced plans to defer more than $500 million in federal funds from Minnesota, claiming the state had failed to protect its Medicaid program from abuse. State officials have defended their oversight and gone to court to challenge the decision.

Vice President JD Vance, who chairs Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, and other administration officials announced the state deferrals at the White House, giving what traditionally would have been technical disputes between state and federal health officials a much higher political profile. Vance’s office did not respond to KFF Health News questions about the administration’s anti-fraud activities related to healthcare.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Andy Schneider, a Georgetown University research professor and a senior adviser at CMS during the Obama administration. “It’s a deferral, not a finding of fraud. This is being elevated by political decision-makers.”

Republican candidates have pounced on the investigations and allegations. In Minnesota, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lisa Demuth, who is speaker of the Minnesota House, released a September ad claiming that her Democratic opponent, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, “has never done anything to stop the fraud here in Minnesota.” Klobuchar has said that as governor she would “launch a top-to-bottom audit of state government to root out fraud.”

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat whose office runs the Medicaid fraud unit, criticized the decision to withhold funds and said weakening the operation would benefit criminals. Her Republican challenger in the November election, Saritha Komatireddy, has cited the Trump administration’s claims during her campaign, telling Fox News Digital that James is “totally failing to prosecute Medicaid fraud.”

The administration says its actions are necessary because fraud diverts taxpayer money from people who legitimately qualify for government programs.

“The fraud doesn’t just steal money — it steals our trust,” Oz said in August on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Democrats and healthcare advocates say the White House’s anti-fraud crusade is being used by Republicans to distract from criticisms over its sweeping funding cuts to Medicaid, the ACA, and other federal health programs.

Republican-backed legislation enacted last year is projected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade.

Congressional Republicans also declined to extend enhanced ACA premium subsidies that expired at the end of 2025, increasing premium costs for many people who buy insurance through the marketplaces. Enrollment has since declined by millions.

Overall, the combined effect of GOP-led changes will result in 16 million more uninsured people by 2034, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Those changes have given Democrats an opening to campaign on protecting healthcare coverage and affordability while Republicans seek to shift some of the debate toward fraud and government spending.

“It’s really a way to distract and reframe the cuts in a different way, to say it’s part of an anti-fraud effort,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, an advocacy group focused on expanding health coverage. “Fighting fraud shouldn’t result in people losing coverage.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Readers Are Pleading To Make American Healthcare Greater

Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names.

Not-So-Great Healthcare

Why doesn’t world-class medicine produce world-class health?

Hayat Norimine’s reporting gets at something that has bothered me for a long time about American healthcare (Priced Out: “As Health Insurance Costs Soar, Healthcare Workers Also Feel the Pinch,” Sept. 22).

We are very proud of U.S. medicine, and we should be. We are at the forefront of new treatments, our clinician workforce is unmatched, and we deploy technologies that seemed impossible just a few years ago. Yet we are in the middle of the pack compared with other countries, in terms of healthy lifespan and many markers of quality care.

At the same time, the cost of accessing care has become outrageously high. When clinicians stop getting health insurance for themselves and their families, you know something is deeply broken.

What good is our health system if most people cannot afford to use it?

One family in Norimine’s story went without insurance when their premiums climbed. Another person kept her coverage but waited weeks to see a doctor because of a $10,000 deductible. These are different problems, but both expose the distance between the care we can provide and the care people can actually access.

Insurance is supposed to help people get the care they need to stay healthy, not just when they are at death’s door. Yet the way insurance is designed can discourage someone from seeing a clinician early, filling a prescription, or following up before a problem gets worse. A clinician may say, “This is what you should do next,” while a person’s coverage gives them a reason to wait or decline.

That tension is not an accident. It is how the system was built. Doctors design care. Insurers design coverage. The two are put together in separate rooms by different teams, measured on different things, then handed to the same person as if they were one plan. No physician would design a $10,000 deductible; it just blocks people from investing in prevention and getting care early. But no physician was in the room when that threshold was set.

Making coverage affordable is essential. So is asking what that coverage enables people to do. If better health is the goal, the people responsible for a person’s health need a hand in shaping what their coverage pays for and when. Design coverage and care together, and it gets easier for people to get the care we know works while avoiding waste.

— Clay Johnston; Austin, Texas

On Dementia, Violence, and Sedation

Reading “Drugs Are Widely Used To Sedate Dementia Patients. Her Sons Wanted To Keep Her Off Them” (Sept. 30) inspired me to share my own experience.

My husband died of dementia about two years ago at age 86. It was not an easy journey. Dementia made him agitated for the same reason it does to others: People with dementia cannot tolerate being told “no.”

So when I had to tell him to stop driving, he became violent. I was told by an eldercare specialist that if my husband remained at home, he might kill me. So it was off to a memory care center, a really good and really expensive one. And he became violent and agitated there because he couldn’t come home, which was what he wanted, and which I could not safely handle. I was also aware that if he couldn’t make it at the memory care center, there was virtually no other place that would take him.

So did I say yes to medication? I did indeed. Even with the antipsychotic, my husband would become out of control. He often tried to “abscond,” as they say in memory-care speak. I also paid through the nose for one-on-one care, which kept him sort of safe. But one night, he fell in the bathroom and broke his hip. A hip replacement was suggested. He was suffering, he had absolutely no quality of life, and I turned the offer down. He was transferred to palliative care and died peacefully about five days later.

There is no solution to this problem that I can see other than medical aid in dying, which he probably would have refused. Me — I will not refuse. My current terror is that I might do this to my remaining family.

— Nora Staffanell; Monroe, New York

The issue is appropriate treatment, not simply drug avoidance.

Jordan Rau’s report rightly highlights the danger of using sedating medications simply to make people with dementia easier to manage. But inappropriate chemical restraint should not be confused with medically appropriate treatment of serious neuropsychiatric symptoms.

Psychosis, agitation, and aggression are distinct. Before prescribing medication, clinicians should identify the target symptom and look for reversible contributors such as pain, infection, medication effects, constipation, sleep disruption, sensory impairment, fear, environmental overstimulation, or the way personal care is being delivered.

Nonpharmacological, person-centered interventions should generally come first. The American Psychiatric Association recommends antipsychotics, outside of emergencies, only when agitation or psychosis is severe, dangerous, or causes substantial distress and after nonpharmacologic approaches have been assessed. When used, treatment should begin at a low dose and aim for the minimum effective dose.

However, nonpharmacological measures do not always suffice. In 2026, the APA reaffirmed that antipsychotics can benefit some older adults with behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia when used judiciously within a comprehensive treatment plan. Brexpiprazole, for example, received FDA approval in 2023 for agitation associated with Alzheimer’s dementia.

These drugs carry real risks, including increased mortality, sedation, orthostasis, extrapyramidal symptoms, cerebrovascular events, and falls. But untreated severe agitation or aggression also carries risks: distress, injury, emergency transfers, hospitalization, caregiver breakdown, and loss of placement.

The responsible question is therefore not whether antipsychotics are dangerous, but whether, for a particular patient and target symptom, likely benefits outweigh risks after reversible causes and nonpharmacological measures have been addressed.

Good dementia care means neither reflexive prescribing nor reflexive withholding. It means careful diagnosis, person-centered care, informed risk-benefit discussion, lowest effective dosing, close monitoring, and periodic attempts to reduce or discontinue medication when appropriate.

— James Ellison; Philadelphia

Decoding ER Bills

Autumn Daniels was billed $410 for an emergency room visit in which no clinician evaluated her (Bill of the Month: “She Left After Waiting Hours in the Emergency Room. The ER Billed Her Anyway,” Sept. 29). She received registration, vital signs, and a single question, then sat in the waiting room for four hours and left.

Carle Health billed CPT code 99281, an evaluation and management service. The American Medical Association’s CPT guidelines, quoted in your article, state that triage alone is not an evaluation and management service and cannot be reported with that code. Carle’s own email confirms the problem by defining “care” to include registration and nursing assessment. That’s triage under another name.

Billing for a service that was not performed is the most important reason insurers deny hospital claims, and it’s what physicians are trained to recognize as fraud. Daniels’ insurer denied the claim under “against medical advice,” a label that cannot apply to a patient no clinician ever saw. The right response is a written refusal to pay, addressed to the hospital, stating that the billed service was never rendered.

I spent 20 years in clinical medicine and over a decade as a health insurance medical director reviewing exactly this question. Daniels should owe nothing.

— Virgie Bright Ellington; New Rochelle, New York

This article goes much deeper than simply exploring lack of treatment in the emergency room. It’s about callous treatment, which is unacceptable on many levels. The ER provided poor care and wasn’t busy, but because the unseen patient was only feeling unwell and not bleeding from every orifice, she wasn’t taken seriously as a priority, so she left. Yet despite not being seen by a doctor, a miscellaneous bill — over $400 — was submitted for payment.

What is pain anyway — feeling uncomfortable? Pain is people dying from triggers in the body. Therefore, treating people like a business by these corporate hospitals is extremely concerning. A person feeling ill, receiving no treatment after four hours of waiting, then leaving the ER with a chronic headache — which could be anything from a brain injury, an upcoming stroke, or a hemorrhage — should not be charged. And certainly a miscellaneous code should not have been applied for the pleasure of pain, waiting, and the five minutes it took to take her temperature.

No, the insurance company should not pay, and it should also let the hospital know that it will be booted from the network for false claims — spending less-than-adequate time with a patient and then submitting bills.

Laws need to be mandated, and advocates must demand optimum care, with healthcare providers abiding by the Hippocratic oath.

People are not stick figures to be treated carelessly and then charged fully. Every time a baseless claim is submitted by the hospital to the insurance company, there’s a trickle-down effect, and rates go up.

It’s akin to being charged for walking on the sidewalk outside a grocery store, checking the fruit stands, getting help from the outside clerk, and then being charged by the store — despite not making a purchase.

Bad service serves no one and will backfire on the provider in the end. How many times do we have to check management at the door for not understanding that very concept? Far too often. We need to show that medical disregard and abuse are not tolerated. It’s essential to pursue change at the federal and state level. Why? Because, ultimately, hospitals are taking advantage of people. They’ve forgotten why they exist.

— Tiff Gadison; Sacramento, California

Living Under the Government’s Thumb

It’s not a good feeling to know that the government has the upper hand and pulls the strings (Health Hub: “Sticker Shock at the Doctor’s Office Could Motivate Midterm Voters,” Sept. 18). Here it is, 2026, and this single mother still struggles — but even more so with talks of cuts and funding to programs I and so many others depend on.

I was interviewed back in November 2018 about an absurd medical bill I received and was expected to pay, even though I have Medicare and Medicaid. Jay Hancock wrote my story, which aired on All Things Considered (Bill of the Month: “Chronically Ill, Traumatically Billed: The $123,000 Medicine for MS,” Nov. 28, 2018). It also appeared on CBS Mornings with Gayle King.

Things definitely haven’t gotten any better for me. I worry about not only my health insurance and my medication but the fact I am on permanent disability. The state of the nation under the current administration is pretty frightening. My Social Security/SSI is my only means of getting by. I receive EBT (electronic benefits transfer for food assistance), and I have a family to feed. I live in government-subsidized housing, based on my income. So pretty much my whole life is controlled by the actions of folks who probably have zero clue how it is to live on a fixed income and with a chronic health condition, one in which stress exacerbates the symptoms, as well as being a single parent.

Don’t even mention being able to afford the price of gas; my car will sit more than go now. I have to pick and choose when to run errands, usually on a day I already have a scheduled appointment. That not only causes me lots of anxiety, but the fatigue is relentless! This is a very stressful, unnerving way to live.

— Shereese Hickson; Niles, Ohio

Uniting for Good

I’m writing on behalf of students with the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative (ALCSI). Our team recently came across Noam N. Levey’s Common Ground article “‘Cancer Doesn’t Care’: Citizen Lobbyists Unite To Push Past Washington’s Ugly Politics” (Oct. 21, 2025), and its message about cancer bringing people together across political divides strongly resonated with our team.

I wanted to share a recent development in California that reflects a similar idea. A lung cancer screening awareness bill that began as an idea from a small group of California college students was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 28, after receiving support from legislators of both parties.

As students passionate about lung cancer screening awareness, our team began exploring legislative action to improve screening rates. In March 2025, we developed the initial proposal that ultimately became California SB 1124 and continued advocating for the bill throughout the legislative process until it was signed into law.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Screening can catch the disease at an earlier, more treatable stage, but many people eligible for lung cancer screening don’t know they qualify or that screening is available to them. SB 1124 addresses that gap by requiring tobacco retailers across California to post signage about lung cancer screening at the point of sale, reaching people where they already are rather than relying on them to seek out the information. Considering that California has historically been one of the states with the lowest lung cancer screening rates, this action is crucial.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Bob Archuleta (D–Pico Rivera). Through grassroots outreach, students involved with this bill initiative helped build a coalition of support from organizations across California and the country, including the California Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Surgeons, and the NAACP California Hawai‘i State Conference, among dozens of others.

Our experience really echoed what stood out to us in Levey’s article: that cancer can bring together people who may disagree on plenty of other issues. We also hope our experience shows that young people can have a meaningful voice in that process and contribute to bringing people together around a shared public health goal.

— Elaine Dong; Los Angeles

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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At a Last-Hope Health Clinic, Desperation, Kindness and Fear for What’s Next

These doctors and community health workers are a safety net for patients losing coverage as premiums soar and Medicaid cuts mount, even as their clinic struggles to stay afloat.

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The New Science of Stuttering

Experts are reaching consensus on what the condition is. Now they’re debating how best to treat it.

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Kenya Confirms Four New Ebola Cases

Seven Ebola infections have now been confirmed in Kenya, which before this month had never recorded cases of the deadly virus.

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A Reporter Who Saw Covid Coming Has Died

Helen Branswell recognized the threat of the pandemic ahead of the vast majority of journalists and even medical experts. She was 69.

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When a Gun Owner Shows Early Signs of Dementia

Public health experts are finding ways to encourage firearm safety practices for older adults who own guns, especially when there are indications of cognitive decline.

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Is Longevity Medicine Going Mainstream?

As major health systems open their own programs, longevity medicine is gaining credibility and becoming more accessible.

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Next Governor To Face Thorny Choices After California’s Rapid Medicaid Expansion

In March 2025, when California ran out of Medicaid funds to pay doctors and hospitals, the state borrowed $3.4 billion to keep the program afloat. It was, as a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted, nothing new. Indeed, a handful of times over the years, the state had taken out internal, short-term loans to sustain its healthcare program for the poor and disabled.

The unprecedented move came a few months later, when Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers agreed to pay down the loan — which grew to $4.4 billion — over 10 years instead of later in the year. California’s healthcare safety net, it seemed, was buckling.

Rising healthcare costs systemwide were partly to blame. But so were several state-led expansions that made California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, one of the nation’s most generous.

Now, with congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, California and dozens of other states must contemplate the limits of their generosity. The problem is particularly acute in the nation’s most populous state, which spends more on Medicaid than New York and Texas combined.

“We know we can’t afford to serve everybody we want to serve in the model that we have today,” said Mark Ghaly, the former top Newsom health official who now co-chairs the Future of Medi-Cal Commission, a 29-person panel with the goal of modernizing and sustaining California’s Medicaid program for those who need it. “What can we do differently? What can we do smarter?”

The 2025 law that Newsom, a Democrat, has dubbed President Donald Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill” is expected to leave millions more Americans without health insurance, mostly because of new work requirements. It also curbs the use of healthcare provider taxes and other strategies states have deployed to maximize federal funds. Some state lawmakers and consumer advocates have argued the federal cuts, along with rising costs, present an opportunity for the next governor to overhaul a program plagued by long appointment wait times, low reimbursement rates for healthcare providers, and volatile financing.

“If we continue to just give millions and millions into the same system and expect something different — I’m sick and tired of that,” said Caroline Menjivar, a Democratic state senator representing a Los Angeles-area district where roughly half of constituents rely on Medi-Cal.

Democratic lawmakers, who have often clashed with Newsom on Medi-Cal rollbacks, succeeded in getting him to delay a number of painful cuts until 2027 in hopes that a new governor might reverse them.

So far, neither of the candidates running in the November election to replace Newsom have offered substantive proposals for weathering the upheaval health policy experts say is on the horizon for a program that covers 1 in 3 Californians — roughly 13.6 million people.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, wants to pare back Medi-Cal eligibility and has promised to end coverage for immigrants without legal status, citing that benefit as an example of “wildly unsustainable” state spending. Democrat Xavier Becerra, who has spent decades trying to expand government-funded healthcare, has promised to protect Californians from the massive federal cuts.

Expanding Coverage

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law that established Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 to cover certain low-income groups, such as families with children, older people, and those with disabilities. Over the past six decades, states have substantially widened that pool, most notably under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to childless adults.

Starting in 2024, California offered healthcare coverage to all low-income residents, regardless of age or immigration status, although lawmakers scaled that back this year. At the same time, the state opted to cover a slew of non-mandated benefits such as physical therapy, hospice care, and housing assistance.

“California has always struggled with wanting to have as broad a program as possible but then having to figure out a way to pay,” said Jennifer Kent, who oversaw Medi-Cal under Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. “There is no population that we have met that we don’t want to offer coverage to, and we’ve never met a benefit that we don’t like.”

Since 2010, California’s Medi-Cal enrollment has nearly doubled while spending has ballooned from $50 billion a year to $222 billion. It now makes up more than 40% of overall state spending, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Conservatives argue the program is bloated and rife with fraud. They say the federal changes will force states to refocus resources on the neediest.

“The role of the safety net programs was just that — to be a safety net,” Hilton said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s a particularly positive boast to say 40% of Californians should be on a program that was designed for people living in poverty.”

Becerra declined an interview request.

Nelly, a 59-year-old from Los Angeles County, was one of millions who have benefited from the state’s Medi-Cal expansion, but she was initially reluctant to sign up.

For years after she left her corporate job to care for her ailing mother, Nelly said, she didn’t consider applying. She remained uninsured until three years ago, when she woke up and couldn’t see out of her left eye.

She enrolled in Medi-Cal in the emergency room. It now covers her appointments with specialists and transportation to and from. While her condition may exempt her from the new Medicaid work requirements, Nelly said, she’s still worried about losing coverage after experiencing numerous paperwork hiccups simply trying to renew.

Nelly, who asked that her full name not be used, because she hasn’t told her family about her condition, said she understands not everyone on the program may need it. But, she added, “it should be there for someone like me.”

Tough Choices Ahead

When Republican state lawmakers got wind of Newsom’s plan to stretch the debt repayment over a decade, they accused Democrats of trying to “paper over” the state’s structural deficit.

“This leaves future governors and legislatures to clean up the mess,” stated a July 2025 memo from GOP senators. The Legislative Analyst’s Office later called the maneuver “unusual.” That could leave Becerra, the favorite to succeed Newsom in the overwhelmingly liberal state, as the face of staggering changes to a program he spent his career defending.

More than 2 million Californians under age 65 could lose health coverage over the next four years as a result of the state and federal policy changes, according to recent estimates by the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. At least 730,000 residents have already disenrolled since June 2025.

State agencies are scrambling to implement new federal work requirement rules for adult Medicaid enrollees under 65, hoping to automate as much verification as possible to blunt coverage losses. And in 2028, states will be required to charge some enrollees fees for many services, making it harder for them to maintain coverage.

Disability rights activists say new asset limits will prevent Californians from getting needed home care, which they say is more cost-effective and humane than nursing homes. Counties, deemed by state law to be healthcare providers of last resort, say they need immediate funding for the millions of uninsured patients they anticipate in the new year.

Hospital administrators have urged policymakers to help them keep their facilities stable, and the state’s most recent budget included some $390 million to assist public and distressed hospitals.

Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles treats five times the patients it was designed to serve, and 80% of patients are uninsured or on Medi-Cal. Demand is so high in the chronically underserved area, MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor said, that the hospital has erected tents in the parking lot. Most emergency room patients are now treated there.

“We already have an extremely overcrowded, overburdened emergency department,” Batchlor said. “Insured care will turn into uncompensated care, and the financial burden for that will fall on providers.”

Becerra has said he opposes the state’s recent freeze on enrollment for adult immigrants without legal status, as well as new monthly premiums set to take effect next year, saying such moves will only saddle taxpayers with higher bills for ER care.

If elected, Becerra will probably need to wade into the politically toxic debate over whether to raise more revenue, cut benefits further, or do both.

Aside from promising to find and eliminate billions in administrative waste from the industry, the nation’s former top health official has not explained how he would cobble together the tens of billions of dollars the state is likely to need just to maintain status quo.

The next governor must tread carefully, Kent warned. “When people come and say, ‘Well, you should just do this because it’s the right thing,’” she said, “all of those right things have fiscal consequences.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

from KFF Health News https://ift.tt/t6gv9cR

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