Kaiser Health News

Desperate Families Search for Affordable Home Care

Published

8 months ago

December 4, 2023

Reed Abelson, The New York Times
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

It's a good day when Frank Lee, a retired chef, can slip out to the hardware store, fairly confident that his wife, Robin, is in the hands of reliable help. He spends nearly every hour of every day anxiously overseeing her care at their home on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina.

Robin Lee, 67, has had dementia for about a decade, but the couple was able to take overseas trips and enjoy their marriage of some 40 years until three years ago, when she grew more agitated, prone to sudden outbursts, and could no longer explain what she needed or wanted. He struggled to care for her largely on his own.

“As Mom's condition got more difficult to navigate, he was just handling it,” said Jesse Lee, the youngest of the couple's three adult children. “It was getting harder and harder. Something had to change, or they would both perish.”

Frank Lee's search for trustworthy home health aides — an experience that millions of American families face — has often been exhausting and infuriating, but he has persisted. He didn't entirely trust the care his wife would get in an assisted living facility. Last August, when a respite program paid for her brief stay in one so Frank, 69, could take a trip to the mountains, she fell and fractured her sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis.

There is precious little assistance from the government for families who need a home health aide, unless they are poor. The people working in these jobs are often woefully underpaid and unprepared to help a frail, older person with dementia bathe and use the bathroom, or to defuse an angry outburst.

Usually, it is family that steps into the breach — grown children who cobble together a fragile chain of visitors to help an ailing father; a middle-aged daughter who returns to her childhood bedroom; a son-in-law working from home who keeps a watchful eye on a confused parent; a wife who can barely manage herself looking after a faltering husband.

Frank Lee finally found two aides on his own, with no help from an agency. Using the proceeds from the sale of his stake in a group of restaurants, including the popular Charleston bistro Slightly North of Broad, he pays them the going rate of about $30 an hour. Between his wife's care and medical expenses, he estimates he's spending between $80,000 and $100,000 a year.

“Who the hell can afford this?” he asked. “There's no relief for families unless they have great wealth or see their wealth sucked away.” He worries that he will run out of money and be forced to sell their home of more than three decades. “Funds aren't unlimited,” he said.

Credited with emphasizing local ingredients and mentoring young chefs in Charleston, Lee retired in 2016, a few years after his wife's diagnosis.

In an interview at the time, he said, “My wife has given up her life to help me in my career, and now I need to pay attention to her.”

In 2020, he contacted a half-dozen home care agencies. Some couldn't fill the position. Others sent aides who were quickly overwhelmed by his wife's behavior. Doctors told the family they believed she has frontotemporal dementia, which appeared to affect her language and how she behaved.

One woman seemed promising, only to quit after a week or two. “We never saw her again,” Lee said. He tried a friend of the family for a time, but she left when her grandmother developed liver cancer.

“It was the whole year of going through different caregivers,” said son Jesse.

Finally, Frank found two women to help. One of them, Ronnie Smalls, has more than a dozen years of experience and is trained in dementia care. She has developed a rapport with Robin, who seems reassured by a quick touch. “We have a really good bond,” Smalls said. “I know her language, her expression.”

One day at the Lees' cozy one-story house, decorated with furniture made by Robin, and with a yard overflowing with greenery, Smalls fed her lunch at the kitchen table with her husband and daughter. Robin seemed to enjoy the company, murmuring in response to the conversation.

At other times, she seemed oblivious to the people around her. She can no longer walk on her own. Two people are often needed to help her get up from a chair or go to the bathroom, transitions she often finds upsetting. A day without an aide — out because of illness or a family emergency — frays the tenuous links that hold the couple's life together.

Lee said his wife barely resembles the woman he married, the one who loved hiking, skiing, and gardening, and who started a neighborhood preschool while raising their three children. A voracious reader, she is now largely silent, staring into space.

The prognosis is bleak, with doctors offering little to hang onto. “What's the end game look like?” Lee asks, wondering if it would be better if his wife had the right to die rather than slowly disappear before his eyes. “As she disintegrates, I disintegrate,” he said. She recently qualified for hospice care, which will involve weekly visits from a nurse and a certified nursing assistant paid under Medicare.

Charleston is flush with retirees attracted by its low taxes and a warm climate, and it boasts of ways to care for them with large for-profit home health chains and a scattering of small agencies. But many families in Charleston and across the nation can't find the help they need. And when they do, it's often spotty and far more expensive than they can afford.

Most Americans want to remain in their own homes, living independently, for as long as possible. They want to avoid nursing homes, which they see as providing poor care, polls have found. And the ranks of older people who need such help will grow. By 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be at least 65 as millions in the baby boomer generation retire.

In dozens of interviews, families described a desperate and sometimes fruitless search for aides to help loved ones with simple tasks on a predictable schedule at an hourly rate they can afford.

Roughly 8 million people 65 and older had dementia or needed help with two or more activities of basic daily life, like getting out of bed, according to an analysis of a federally funded survey of older Americans by KFF Health News and The New York Times. Only a million received paid help outside of a nursing home, and nearly 3 million had no help at all.

Most families can't afford what agencies charge — about $27 an hour, according to Genworth, a long-term care insurance company. So, many take their chances on untrained caregivers found through word-of-mouth, Craigslist, or other resources.

A Scarcity of Workers

One of the main obstacles to finding paid help is the chronic shortage of workers. Some 3.7 million people had jobs as aides in home health or personal care in 2022, with half of them earning less than $30,000 year, or $14.51 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of people needed is expected to increase by more than 20% over the next decade. But the working conditions are hard, the pay is usually bad, and the hours are inconsistent.

About 3 million people are working in private homes, according to a 2023 analysis by PHI, a nonprofit that studies and acts as an advocate for the workforce, although official estimates may not count many workers paid off the books or hired outside of an agency by a family. Eighty-five percent of home care workers are women, two-thirds are people of color, and roughly a third are immigrants. The pay is often so low that more than half qualify for public assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Dawn Geisler, 53, has made only $10 an hour working as a home health aide in the Charleston area for the past four years, without ever getting a raise. She declined to name the agency that employs her because she doesn't want to lose her job.

Geisler discovered she liked the work after caring for her mother. Unlike an office job, “every day is just a little bit different,” she said. She now juggles two clients. She might accompany one to the doctor and keep the other one company. “I'm taking care of them like they were my own family,” she said.

The agency provides no guarantee of work and doesn't always tell her what to expect when she walks through the door, except to say someone has Alzheimer's or is in a wheelchair. Her supervisors often fail to let her know if her client goes to the hospital, so families know to call her cellphone. She has waited weeks for a new assignment without getting paid a penny. She herself has no health insurance and sometimes relies on food banks to put meals on the table.

“I'm not making enough to pay all the bills I have,” said Geisler, who joined an advocacy group called the Fight for $15, which is pushing to raise the minimum wage in South Carolina and across the country. When her car broke down, she couldn't afford to get it fixed. Instead, she walked to work or borrowed her fiancé's bicycle.

Most home health agencies nationwide are for-profit and are often criticized for ignoring the needs of workers in favor of the bottom line.

“The business models are based on cheap labor,” said Robyn Stone, senior vice president of research for LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit agencies. The industry has historically tolerated high turnover but now can't attract enough workers in a strong, competitive job market. “I think there has been a rude awakening for a lot of these companies,” she said.

Many agencies have also refused to pay overtime or travel costs between jobs, and many have been accused of wage theft in lawsuits filed by home care workers or have been sanctioned by state and federal agencies.

Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor, is supposed to provide home aides but faces shortages of workers at the rates it pays workers. At least 20 states pay less than $20 an hour for a personal care aide, according to a recent state survey by KFF. Aides are often paid less under Medicaid than if they care for someone paying privately.

With low pay and few benefits, many people would rather work the checkout line in a supermarket or at a fast-food chain than take on the emotionally demanding job of caring for an older person, said Ashlee Pittmann, the chief executive of Interim HealthCare of Charleston, a home health agency. She said that she recently raised wages by $2 an hour and had had more success keeping employees, but that she still worried that “we may not be able to compete with some larger companies.”

The Biden administration failed to obtain an additional $400 billion from Congress for home- and community-based services to shift emphasis away from institutional care. President Joe Biden signed an executive order this year to encourage some reforms, and federal officials have proposed requiring home health agencies to spend 80 cents of every government dollar on paying workers under Medicaid. But so far, little has changed.

Falling Through the ‘Doughnut Hole‘

Long-term care coverage for most Americans is a yawning gap in government programs. And the chasm is widening as more Americans age into their 70s, 80s, and 90s.

The government's main program for people 65 and older is Medicare, but it pays for a home aide only when a medical condition, like recovery from a stroke, has made a person eligible for a nurse or therapist to come to the home. And the aide is usually short-term. Medicare doesn't cover long-term care.

Medicaid, which does pay for long-term care at home, is limited to serving the poor or those who can demonstrate they have hardly any assets. But, again, the worker shortage is so pervasive that waiting lists for aides are years long, leaving many people without any option except a nursing home.

So millions of Americans keep trying to hang in and stay home as long as they can. They're not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but they can't afford to hire someone privately.

Many fall through what April Abel, a former home health nurse from Roper St. Francis Healthcare in Charleston, described as “the doughnut hole.”

“I feel so bad for them because they don't have the support system they need,” she said.

She tried fruitlessly for months to find help for Joanne Ganaway, 79 and in poor health, from charities or state programs while she visited her at home. Ganaway had trouble seeing because of a tear in her retina and was often confused about her medications, but the small pension she had earned after working nearly 20 years as a state employee made her ineligible for Medicaid-sponsored home care.

So Ganaway, who rarely leaves her house, relies on friends or family to get to the doctor or the store. She spends most of her day in a chair in the living room. “It has been difficult for me, to be honest,” she said.

Turning to Respite Services

With no hope of steady help, there is little left to offer overstretched wives, husbands, sons, and daughters other than a brief respite. The Biden administration has embraced the idea of respite services under Medicare, including a pilot program for the families of dementia patients that will begin in 2024.

One nonprofit, Respite Care Charleston, provides weekday drop-off sessions for people with dementia for almost four hours a day.

Lee's wife went for a couple of years, and he still makes use of the center's support groups, where caregivers talk about the strain of watching over a loved one's decline.

On any given morning, nearly a dozen people with dementia gather around a table. Two staff members and a few volunteers work with the group as they play word games, banter, bat balls around, or send a small plastic jumping frog across the table.

Their visits cost $50 a session, including lunch, and the organization's brief hours keep it under the minimum state requirements for licensing.

“We're not going to turn someone away,” Sara Perry, the group's executive director, said. “We have some folks who pay nothing.”

The service is a godsend, families say. Parkinson's disease and a stroke have left Dottie Fulmer's boyfriend, Martyn Howse, mentally and physically incapacitated, but he enjoys the sessions.

“Respite Care Charleston has been a real key to his keeping going,” she said, “to both of us, quite frankly, continuing to survive.”

——————————
By: Reed Abelson, The New York Times
Title: Desperate Families Search for Affordable Home Care
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/dying-broke-desperate-families-search-for-affordable-home-care/
Published Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Post Views: 289

Related Topics:Featured Health Kaiser Health News News

Up Next

Doctors on (Video) Call: Rural Medics Get Long-Distance Help in Treating Man Gored by Bison

Don't Miss

What to Know About Home Care Services

Kaiser Health News

Union With Labor Dispute of Its Own Threatens to Cut Off Workers’ Health Benefits

Published

13 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Staff Editor

Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The National Education Association, the nation's largest union, is threatening to cut off health insurance to about 300 Washington, D.C.-based workers on Aug. 1 in an effort to end a bitter contract dispute.

It's a tactic some private employers have used as leverage against unionized workers that has drawn scrutiny from congressional Democrats and is prohibited for state employers in California. Experts on labor law say they've never seen a union make the move against its own workers.

“This is like a man-bites-dog situation where the union is now in a position as the employer,” said Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University. “It's not a good look for a union.”

NEA workers with pressing health needs are worried but say they won't fold. Joye Mercer Barksdale, a writer on the NEA's government relations team, said she needs coverage for a medical procedure to address atrial fibrillation, a cardiac disorder. “This is insane for the NEA to use our health benefits as a bargaining chip,” she said.

But Barksdale said the threat isn't enough to force her to agree to an unacceptable contract. “I am not ready to give in,” she said.

The NEA Staff Organization, the union representing workers at the NEA's headquarters, launched a strike on July 5 in Philadelphia, during the union's annual delegate assembly. It was its second walkout this summer as the two parties negotiate a new contract, navigating sticking points such as wages and remote work.

In response, the NEA ended the conference early. President Joe Biden was supposed to speak at the event but withdrew, refusing to cross the picket line. The NEA on July 24 endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

On July 8, the day after the conference had been scheduled to end, the NEA locked out workers. In a letter the day before, the NEA informed its unionized workers that they would not be paid, effective immediately, and their health benefits would expire at the end of July unless a new deal were reached.

“NEA cannot allow NEASO to act again in a way that will bring such lasting harm to our members and our organization,” Kim Anderson, the NEA's executive director, wrote in the letter, obtained by KFF Health News. “We are, and have always been, committed both to our union values and to the importance of conducting ourselves as a model employer.”

Democrats in Congress, including Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, introduced legislation last year to protect striking workers from losing their health benefits, after several large companies, including General Motors, John Deere, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), and the maker of Kellogg's cereals, threatened to or did cut off coverage during labor disputes.

“Workers shouldn't have to choose between their family's health and a fair contract,” Brown said in a statement to KFF Health News.

The legislation was endorsed by large labor unions including the Service Employees International Union and United Steelworkers, according to a press release from Brown's office. The NEA wasn't among them.

“This tactic is immoral, and it should be illegal,” United Steelworkers' president at the time, Thomas Conway, said in the release.

Officials at the NEA, which represents teachers and other administrators, declined an interview request. In a statement, the organization's president, Becky Pringle, said “we are making every effort to reach an agreement as quickly as possible” with its staff union.

“As union leaders who have been on strike, we recognize the significance and impact of these important decisions on a personal and family level. We truly value our employees and look forward to continued collaboration with NEASO to develop a new contract that benefits us all,” she said.

Kate Hilts, a digital strategist who works for the NEA, said she fears losing her coverage will leave her unable to afford treatment for a rare autoimmune disease that attacks her kidneys. Her next treatment was slated for August.

“I wake up every day and can't believe this is happening,” she said. “You would expect this from an employer that is antiworker or has a terrible labor record, but I am totally flabbergasted that a labor union would do this that bills itself as pro-worker, pro-family, pro-education, and pro-children.”

The NEA staff union has filed multiple charges with the National Labor Relations Board this year, including allegations that the NEA withheld holiday overtime pay and failed to provide information on the outsourcing of millions of dollars in bargaining unit work.

California is one of the only states that protect striking workers from losing health coverage. The state legislature passed a law in 2021 that blocks the tactic from being used against public employees and another law in 2022 that allows any striking workers who lose their insurance to immediately get heavily discounted coverage through the state's Affordable Care Act marketplace.

If they remain locked out, the NEA workers would be eligible for coverage under COBRA, a federal program that allows people who are fired or laid off to maintain their employer-sponsored insurance for 18 months.

But the coverage can be a financial hardship, as individuals often must pay the entire cost of their insurance premiums, plus a 2% administrative fee.

Another option for workers would be coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, though that also could be costly. And it may be unclear how soon that coverage would begin or whether insurers would cover their existing doctors.

“I'm hoping the NEA will be so ashamed of what they are doing that, at the very least, they will not take away our health benefits,” Barksdale said.

——————————
By: Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News
Title: Union With Labor Dispute of Its Own Threatens to Cut Off Workers' Health Benefits
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nea-national-education-association-union-threatens-health-insurance-benefit-lockout/
Published Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/the-cdcs-test-for-bird-flu-works-but-it-has-issues/

Post Views: 31

Kaiser Health News

The CDC’s Test for Bird Flu Works, but It Has Issues

Published

15 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Staff Editor

Arthur Allen and Amy Maxmen
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says a glitch in its bird flu test hasn't harmed the agency's outbreak response. But it has ignited scrutiny of its go-it-alone approach in testing for emerging pathogens.

The agency has quietly worked since April to resolve a nagging issue with the test it developed, even as the virus swept through dairy farms and chicken houses across the country and infected at least 13 farmworkers this year.

At a congressional hearing July 23, Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) asked about the issue. “Boy, that rings of 2020,” he said, referring to when the nation was caught off guard by the covid-19 pandemic, in part because of dysfunctional tests made by the CDC. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, responded that the agency rapidly developed a workaround that makes its bird flu test reliable.

“The tests are 100% usable,” he later told KFF Health News, adding that the FDA studied the tests and came to the same conclusion. The imperfect tests, which have a faulty element that sometimes requires testing a sample again, will be replaced soon. He added, “We have made sure that we're offering a high-quality product.”

Still, some researchers were unnerved by the news coming four months after the government declared a worrisome bird flu outbreak among cattle. The CDC's test is the only one available for clinical use. Some researchers say its flaws, though manageable, underscore the risk of relying on a single entity for testing.

The problem came to light in April as the agency prepared to distribute its test to about 100 public health labs around the country. CDC officials detected the issue through a quality control system put in place after the covid test catastrophe of 2020.

Daskalakis said the CDC's original test design was fine, but a flaw emerged when a company contracted by the agency manufactured the tests in bulk. In these tests, one of two components that recognize proteins called H5 in the H5N1 bird flu virus was unreliable, eliminating an important safeguard. By targeting the same protein twice, tests have a built-in backup in case one part fails.

The agency developed a fix to ensure a reliable result: If only one of the two parts detected H5, the test was considered inconclusive and would be run again. With the FDA's blessing, the CDC distributed the tests — with workaround instructions — to public health labs.

Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said the results of the tests have not been ambiguous, and there is no need to discard the tests.

Still, the agency has asked a different manufacturer to remake the faulty component so that 1.2 million improved tests will be available soon, Daskalakis said. Some of the updated tests are already in stock at the CDC, but the FDA hasn't yet signed off on their use. Daskalakis declined to name the manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the outbreak has grown. Farmworkers continue to lack information about the virus and gear to protect them from it. Rural clinics may miss cases if they don't catch a person's connection to a farm and notify health officials rather than their usual diagnostic testing laboratories.

Those clinical labs remain unauthorized to test for the bird flu. Several of those labs have spent months working through analyses and red tape so that they can run the CDC's tests. As part of the licensing process, the CDC alerted them to the workaround with the current test, too.

But outside select circles, the news was largely overlooked. “I'm totally surprised by this,” Alex Greninger, assistant director of the University of Washington Clinical Virology Laboratory, told KFF Health News this week. Greninger's lab is developing its own test and has been trying to obtain CDC test kits to evaluate.

“It's not a red alarm,” he said, but he's worried that as the CDC and the FDA spend months developing and evaluating an updated test, the only one available relies on a single component. If the genetic code underlying that fragment of the H5 protein mutates, the test could give false results.

It's not uncommon for academic and commercial diagnostic labs to make mistakes and catch them during quality control checks, as the CDC did. Still, this isn't the agency's first mishap. In 2016, well before the covid debacle, CDC officials for months directed public health labs to use a Zika test that failed about a third of the time.

The CDC caught and worked to remediate the situation far more quickly and effectively in this case. Nonetheless, the mishap raises concern. Michael Mina, chief science officer of the telemedicine company eMed.com, said diagnostic companies may be better suited to the task.

“It's a reminder that CDC is not a robust manufacturer of tests” and lacks the resources that industry can marshal for their production, Mina said. “We do not ask CDC to make vaccines and pharmaceuticals, and we do not ask the Pentagon to manufacture missiles.”

The CDC has licensed its updated test design to at least seven clinical diagnostic labs. Such labs are the foundation of testing in the U.S. But none have FDA clearance to use them.

Diagnostic labs are developing their own tests, too. But that has been slow-going. One reason is the lack of guaranteed sales. Another is regulatory uncertainty. Recent FDA guidance could make it harder for nongovernmental laboratories to issue new tests in the early phase of pandemics, said Susan Van Meter, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, in a July 1 letter to the FDA.

Transparency is also critical, scientists said. Benjamin Pinsky, medical director of the clinical virology laboratory at Stanford University, said as a public agency the CDC should make its protocol — its recipe for making the test — easily accessible online.

The World Health Organization does so for its bird flu tests, and with that information in hand, Pinsky's lab has developed an H5 bird flu test suited to the strain circulating this year in the U.S. The lab published its approach this month but doesn't have FDA authorization for its broad use.

The CDC's test recipe is available in a published patent, Daskalakis said.

“We have made sure that tests are out there, and that they work,” he added.

As the CDC came under fire at the July 23 congressional hearing, Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, noted that testing is just one tool. The agency needs money for another promising area — looking for the virus in wastewater. Its current program uses supplemental funds, he said: “It is not in the current budget and will go away without additional funding.”

——————————
By: Arthur Allen and Amy Maxmen
Title: The CDC's Test for Bird Flu Works, but It Has Issues
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-test-cdc-flaws/
Published Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Post Views: 22

Kaiser Health News

KFF Health News’ ‘What the Health?’: Harris in the Spotlight

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

Staff Editor

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:45:00 +0000

The Host

Julie Rovner
KFF Health News

@jrovner

Read Julie's stories.

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News' weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

As Vice President Kamala Harris appears poised to become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, health policy in general and reproductive health issues in particular are likely to have a higher profile. Harris has long been the Biden administration's point person on abortion rights and reproductive health and was active on other health issues while serving as California's attorney general.

Meanwhile, Congress is back for a brief session between presidential conventions, but efforts in the GOP-led House to pass the annual spending bills, due by Oct. 1, have run into the usual roadblocks over abortion-related issues.

This week's panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Stephanie Armour of KFF Health News, Rachel Cohrs Zhang of Stat, and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Panelists

Stephanie Armour
KFF Health News

@StephArmour1

Read Stephanie's stories.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang
Stat News

@rachelcohrs

Read Rachel's stories.

Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politico

@AliceOllstein

Read Alice's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week's episode:

President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the presidential race has turned attention to his likely successor on the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris. At this late hour in the campaign, she is expected to adopt Biden's health policies, though many anticipate she'll take a firmer stance on restoring Roe v. Wade. And while abortion rights supporters are enthusiastic about Harris' candidacy, opponents are eager to frame her views as extreme.
As he transitions from incumbent candidate to outgoing president, Biden is working to frame his legacy, including on health policy. The president has expressed pride that his signature domestic achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, took on the pharmaceutical industry, including by forcing the makers of the most expensive drugs into negotiations with Medicare. Yet, as with the Affordable Care Act's delayed implementation and results, most Americans have yet to see the IRA's potential effect on drug prices.
Lawmakers continue to be hung up on federal government spending, leaving appropriations work undone as they prepare to leave for summer recess. Fights over abortion are, once again, gumming up the works.
In abortion news, Iowa's six-week limit is scheduled to take effect next week, causing rippling problems of abortion access throughout the region. In Louisiana, which added the two drugs used in medication abortions to its list of controlled substances, doctors are having difficulty using the pills for other indications. And doctors who oppose abortion are pushing higher-risk procedures, like cesarean sections, in lieu of pregnancy termination when the mother's life is in danger — as states with strict bans, like Texas and Louisiana, are reporting a rise in the use of surgeries, including hysterectomies, to end pregnancies.
The Government Accountability Office reports that many states incorrectly removed hundreds of thousands of eligible people from the Medicaid rolls during the “unwinding” of the covid-19 public health emergency's coverage protections. The Biden administration has been reluctant to call out those states publicly in an attempt to keep the process as apolitical as possible.

Also this week, Rovner interviews Anthony Wright, the new executive director of the consumer health advocacy group Families USA. Wright spent the past two decades in California, working with, among others, now-Vice President Kamala Harris on various health issues.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: NPR's “A Study Finds That Dogs Can Smell Your Stress — And Make Decisions Accordingly,” by Rachel Treisman.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Stat's “A Pricey Gilead HIV Drug Could Be Made for Dramatically Less Than the Company Charges,” by Ed Silverman, and Politico's “Federal HIV Program Set To Wind Down,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and David Lim.

Stephanie Armour: Vox's “Free Medical School Won't Solve the Doctor Shortage,” by Dylan Scott.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang: Stat's “How UnitedHealth Harnesses Its Physician Empire To Squeeze Profits out of Patients,” by Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross, and Lizzy Lawrence.

Also mentioned on this week's podcast:

States Newsroom's “Anti-Abortion Researchers Back Riskier Procedures When Pregnancy Termination Is Needed, Experts Say,” by Sofia Resnick.
KFF Health News' “Louisiana Reclassifies Drugs Used in Abortions as Controlled Dangerous Substances,” by Rosemary Westwood, WWNO.
The New York Times' “Biden and Georgia Are Waging a Fight Over Medicaid and the Future of Obamacare,” by Noah Weiland.

Credits

Francis Ying
Audio producer

Emmarie Huetteman
Editor

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KFF Health News' “What the Health?” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

——————————
Title: KFF Health News' ‘What the Health?': Harris in the Spotlight
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/podcast/what-the-health-357-kamala-harris-campaign-health-policy-july-25-2024/
Published Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:45:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/montana-looks-to-become-latest-state-to-boost-nonprofit-hospital-oversight/

Post Views: 28