With Congress set to debate “Medicare-for-all,” Tarbell examines efforts by health insurers to take over past health care reforms.
Let us see if the Devos family has the heart to chip in on a woman's transplant.
A cheaper premium or no premium sounds good when you’re well, but what happens when you’re sick?
This story was written for Tarbell.org. It was co-published with the Hancock Herald in Hancock, N.Y., and 100 Days in Appalachia. Most of Betty Rosengrant’s extended family needs Medicaid. They’re also mostly Republicans. Rosengrant says she knows Republicans have proposed cuts to the federal/state health care system, but that “people...
In the 1960s, with no funding for long-term, chronic dialysis, hospital committees decided who would live and die. It was the federal government that put an end to this practice.
Many Medicare Advantage plans have small networks and high deductibles. If you go out of network, even unknowingly, you will be on the hook for a lot of money out of your own pocket.
You have no guarantee that the doctors and hospitals that the insurance company say are in your network will still be there in the future. And you, not the insurer, get stuck with a the big bill.
"Even I was dismayed when I learned I'd have to go into an NHS hospital."
The new Martin Shkreli is Nostrum Laboratories’ Nirmal Mulye – who raised the price of a bladder infection antibiotic from $475 a bottle to nearly $2,400 a bottle.
Wise, Virginia is not a place that’s easy to get to. It’s 50 miles from the nearest interstate and almost 70 miles from the nearest commercial airport. And regardless of where you start from on your way to Wise—a town of 3,000 people in the Southern Appalachians—you’ll have to...
America’s biggest corporations—prescription drug distributors in particular—are playing in our growing opioid epidemic.
Were it not for the business practices of some of the biggest corporations in America that profit from the manufacture and distribution of massive quantities of opioids, many of those we have lost likely would still be with us. How are those big corporations responding? In one notable case...
Seventy-five percent of Democrats support “Medicare for all.” But the American health care industry appears to have pushed Democratic leaders away from backing House candidates who would support universal public health insurance. This backhanded approach occurs as key lobbies for the industry have united in opposition to single-payer with...
Which one will be first?
Chances are, you saw a headline or heard a report that went something like this: Expanding Medicare to cover all Americans would cost $32.6 trillion dollars. If I was still a flack for the health insurance industry, I would have worked hard behind the scenes to make sure you saw...
Insurance company CEOs and their shareholders, that’s who.
Studies show life expectancy in the United States is going down while it continues to go up in other developed countries.
Donna Smith, a major force behind expanding the United State's health care system, is hanging up her hat.
I’ve been asked many times if there was one thing, one moment, that led me to leave my job at a big health insurance corporation. Yes, there was, and it occurred five days before Christmas in 2007. That was when a beautiful 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan passed away,...
“We need to give the criminal purveyors of these products no quarter,” Scott Gottlieb, FDA Commissioner, said.