Community & Public Health

Two patient advocates make a case for why patients need a stronger bill of rights to ensure they receive quality care and are more involved in care decisions.

On a Monday in early October, the top administrator at the the Manatee Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Bradenton, Florida issued a terse order to subordinates: “Do not flush.”

Half of California’s 10 counties with the highest teenage birth rates are in the Central Valley, despite statewide record lows in teen births. Even so, the Valley lacks programs that help boys understand the responsibilities of sex and parenthood.

While the drug’s $94,500 cost puts it out of reach of the uninsured patients who use the Florida clinic, the drug’s maker provides it for free to qualified, low-income patients.

The numbers are eye-popping: $25,000 MRIs, the $1,000-a-day hepatitis B drug, $629 for an ER visit that only delivered a Band-Aid. As leading health care economists bluntly put it in a famous research paper, “It’s the prices stupid.” Experts increasingly point to the high cost of care in America — n

UC Irvine recently announced a $200 million gift to establish a new college of integrative medicine. The press coverage revealed a long-running bias from the media toward alternative therapies, one supporter argues.

Earlier this year, the EPA rejected a long-running petition to ban chlorpyrifos, which poses serious health risks to young children. But the health threats go way beyond chlorpyrifos, a leading researcher says.

The effort is bringing together civic leaders, police, educators, community groups and religious leaders. The goals are to curb gang-related crime, help children stay out of gangs, and deal with emotional aftermath of violence.

This article and others in this series were produced as part of a project for the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship, in conjunction with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism....

Antonia Gonzales and Sarah Gustavus traveled to the Navajo Nation recently to examine how a lack of access to water in many homes influences beverage choices and what might be done to increase water consumption among young people.