A recent Sac Bee investigation revealed disturbingly high staff turnover rates at a number of California nursing homes. You can discover similar trends by learning how to navigate the data in California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development and similar agencies nationwide.
Sign-ups for insurance on the federal and state health exchanges end in less than a month, and the state's push to enroll more Latinos appears to be paying off. Meanwhile, safety net providers such as Clinica Sierra Vista are focused on both signing up and retaining patients.
"Narrowing of networks" was an abstract concept to me until Blue Shield narrowed my own network of healthcare providers, most of whom I have been seeing for 18 years.
As a federal "funding bump" expires, the payments California doctors receive for seeing Medicaid patients are dramatically decreasing. At the same time, the state is imposing a 10 percent fee cut that was approved in 2011 but is just now taking effect.
In New Jersey, an estimated 11,000 Medicaid applicants are still trapped in a tangle of digital red tape and a bureaucratic maze. Some families have been in limbo for nearly a year. The state has yet to announce any permanent solution.
A strongly reported series examining a new program targeting 'super-utilizers' in Pennsylvania debunks a number of myths about the system's sickest and most vulnerable patients. Timothy Darragh tells the story behind the story and the lessons he learned along the way.
Contributing editor William Heisel shares a few of his favorite health stories from the past year in the first of two posts.
The ACA expanded insurance coverage, but many children throughout the country are still not receiving important health care benefits. The extent of the coverage exclusions varies widely depending upon which state a child calls home.
As the pool of uninsured shrinks, public hospital systems must increasingly compete for newly insured patients. “We're forcing public hospitals to compete in one of the most competitive industries that has ever existed in the economy,” said one county health director.
After months of reporting on immigrants' experiences in enrolling for health coverage, reporter Momo Chang still didn't have the long cover story she'd envisioned. But she stayed flexible and ended up with a compact news story that focused on a single facet of immigrant enrollment.
