While states such as Texas and Florida have repeatedly rejected efforts to expand Medicaid in the first place, California is on the verge of expanding public health coverage to include undocumented children. But will they be able to find access to care in an already crowded Medicaid system?
Mary Annette Pember wrote this article, originally published by Indian Country Today Media Network, as a 2014 National Health Journalism Fellow, with support from The Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism. Other stories in her project series can be found here:...
As teens age out of pediatric care, there's often a lag that can stretch on for years before they enter the fold of adult primary care. For young adults with chronic illnesses, that gap poses real risks. A recent study outlines the scope of the problem, even as progress on the issue remains stalled.
Alaska has the nation’s highest rate of people living without plumbing, and that can translate into real health problems for rural families. Despite the problem, state officials have declined to make the larger investments needed to improve conditions for the state's more remote residents.
In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore residents took to the streets in protest. The best media coverage showed how years of neglect have crippled West Baltimore economies, fostered distrust and violence, and put a long, healthy life entirely out of reach for many residents, Gray included.
The privilege that has allowed parents to refuse immunizations for their kids stems not from economic or educational status — it springs from the privilege of not having seen the horrific diseases that ravaged U.S. children just two generations ago, and continue to do so worldwide.
Mary Annette Pember wrote this article, originally published by Indian Country Today Media Network, as a 2014 National Health Journalism Fellow, with support from The Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism. Other stories in her project series can be found here:...
Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing California farming communities. But after running into a series of data swamps, she turned to experts for help and unexpectedly found her story in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Calif.
With Biomonitoring California, state health and environmental officials have hit an early milestone in their efforts to discover which industrial chemicals are making their way into the bodies of residents. Research has shown that chemical exposure can seriously disrupt cellular function over time.
The hardest part of reporting on the health implications of Central Valley rivers was not the research or content, but finding the right characters for the stories. In the end, a radio reporter discovered the best way to find the characters that brought his stories to life was on the river itself.
