A provision under the Affordable Care Act allows Medicare to penalize hospitals for high readmission rates within 30 days of discharge, particularly among patients with heart attacks, heart failure or pneumonia. So hospitals near and far have begun various initiatives.
Lexi Winnell, a 9-year-old girl with Native American ancestry, is insulin resistant. Her grandparents have gone all out to keep her from getting diabetes.
West Virginia is among the top five states on just about every national chronic disease list. Journalist Kate Long investigates what's behind the state's poor showing.
For a decade, Washington has been fighting for your life. Yet you might not even know this because it's been a quiet battle, a fight designed to work its way into the fabric of your life. It's about your weight — or, more important, the weight of your children.
It's 6 p.m. You're tired and hungry. Food is the No. 1 thing on your mind.Your favorite fast-food restaurants line the roads home – McDonald's, Taco Bell, Domino's. So what's for dinner?
Picture a honey sunrise glistening across the Pacific. A wave rises up, lifting a golden surfer, hair flapping in the wind like a flag as he negotiates a perfect turn and glides toward the beach. He steps onto the sand and his smile falls. Among the women in bikinis and men playing volleyball is a horrible scene of human suffering: a throng of senior citizens in wheel chairs, their bellies distended from malnutrition, flies landing on their eyelids, which are too sapped of any strength even to blink them away.
From greener school lunches to required nutritional information printed on fast-food menus, it's clear that state and federal governments are urging Americans to take control of their health -- starting with food. This is part four in a four-part series.
Part one: Convenience often trumps nutrition
Part two: Committed to nutrition
Part three: Providing healthier choices
Part 2: Researchers trying to find why people with disease fail to act against it.
