Malik Stanton is among 2 million children in Florida — about half the state’s under-20 population — who depend on the state’s $24 billion Medicaid program for health care. That same health care system very nearly let him die.
Health Insurance and Costs
Thousands of babies are born every year in Bexar County, Texas, to mothers who receive no prenatal care. Those women are more likely to give birth prematurely, increasing the odds that their newborns will develop immediate and long-lasting health problems that can be both costly and fatal.
We thought we knew the main reasons why doctors perform too many C-sections in the U.S. But a recently reported study points to another cause: Doctors are often wrong in predicting babies' weight, and that can lead to unnecessary cesareans.
Are insurance policies too complicated to understand? They always have been and always will be unless there are changes in the way policies work, or until there are rules to make it easier for buyers to compare options.
In the past couple of years, the Affordable Care Act has provided thousands of residents at Wyandotte County with health insurance, creating a surge in demand for health care in a county that had already been designated a Health Professional Shortage Area by the federal government.
In pediatric practices across Florida, doctors are struggling to serve patients in the face of paltry reimbursement rates and more intense demands from Medicaid insurance companies.
A complaint filed this week alleges that California is engaging in unlawful discrimination by paying some of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country to the state’s Medicaid providers. As some coverage pointed out, the notion that low rates are limiting access to doctors is “not unfounded."
The health insurance marketplaces offer consumers a multitude of options, but sorting out which plan bests suit their needs can be a slog. That’s especially true when it comes to figuring out whether a particular doctor is part of a plan’s network, since the directories are famously unreliable.
Notions of personal failure and our collective ignorance of what it’s like to live on $8.60 a day help explain why 20 states have not covered the very poorest, and why Medicaid as we know it could disappear.
As we pass the two-year mark on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalists are still asking a lot of questions about just how well health reform is working when it comes to expanding coverage. Data journalist Meghan Hoyer shows data fellows how to interrogate the data.