Matt Ashley, a senior technologist at Johnson Memorial Health in Franklin, Indiana, is part of a small IT team that spent months helping the hospital recover after a crippling cyberattack in 2021. Farah Yousry/WFYI hide caption
Health Inc. : Shots - Health News As spending on care rises, the business of health keeps getting more important. We feature news on and analysis of drugmakers, health insurers, hospitals, doctors and others in the business of providing health care.
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Doctors' offices often offer special medical credit cards as a solution to paying off large medical bills. But patients may end up paying far more for their bills when they have to pay interest down the road. Fly View Productions/Getty Images hide caption
Since the pandemic, some hospitals have started offering to let patients with acute illness recuperate at-home, with 24-hour remote access to medical professionals and daily home visits. FG Trade/Getty Images hide caption
Students at the University of Minnesota celebrate their induction into medical school. The U.S. has disproportionately few Black and Hispanic doctors. Some of the barriers to entering the profession start before even getting into medical school, recent research finds, including financial pressures and racism. Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune via Getty Images hide caption
Diversity in medicine can save lives. Here's why there aren't more doctors of color
Teen with life-threatening depression finally found hope. Then insurance cut her off
Startup companies say that new programs similar to ChatGPT could complete doctors' paperwork for them. But some experts worry that inherent bias and a tendency to fabricate facts could lead to errors. ER Productions Limited/Getty Images hide caption
Doctors are drowning in paperwork. Some companies claim AI can help
Clinics in rural areas with fewer doctors, dentists and nurses are turning to mobile health care clinics to take care to where it's most needed. The Healthy Communities Coalition organizes a few mobile dental events each year in Lyon County, Nev. Wendy Madson/KHN hide caption
After her pregnancy, Danielle Laskey discovered the hospital was out of network for her health plan, and her insurer said surprise-billing laws protecting patients from big out-of-network bills for emergency care did not apply Ryan Henriksen/KHN hide caption
A surprise-billing law loophole? Her pregnancy led to a six-figure hospital bill
Physicians are lobbying Congress for a raise in Medicare reimbursement rates, among other requests. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images hide caption
Paul Davis is a retired physician in Findlay, Ohio, who gets weekly treatments of the drug Kimmtrak to help stave off the progression of his rare cancer — uveal melanoma. He worries the accumulating cost of the drug — nearly $50,000/week if he has to pay it out of pocket — could saddle his family with crushing medical debt after he's gone. Maddie McGarvey for KHN hide caption
Diagnosing and treating patients was once an ER doctor's domain, but they are increasingly being replaced by health practitioners who can perform many of the same duties and generate much the same revenue for less than half the pay. Phil Fisk/Image Source via Getty Images hide caption
Activists hold a banner reading "Take down the Sackler name" in front of the Pyramid of the Louvre museum in Paris on July 1, 2019. Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' chronicles Nan Goldin's career of art and activism
New York state records show nearly half the state's 600-plus nursing homes hired real estate, management and staffing companies run or controlled by their owners, frequently paying them well above the cost of services. Meanwhile, in the pandemic's height, the federal government was giving the facilities hundreds of millions in fiscal relief. Maskot/Getty Images hide caption
Humira, the injectable biologic treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, now faces its first competition from one of several copycat "biosimilar" drugs expected to come to market this year. Some patients spend $70,000 a year on Humira. JB Reed/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption
Scant obesity training in medical school leaves docs ill-prepared to help patients
The Westin St. Francis San Francisco on Union Square hotel hosted this year's JPMorgan Healthcare Conference — the first since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. (Darius Tahir/KHN) Darius Tahir/KHN hide caption
Jeff and Kareen King received a hospital bill for $160,000 a few weeks after Jeff had a procedure to restore his heart rhythm. Bram Sable-Smith/KHN hide caption
An investigation of more than 500 U.S. hospitals show that many use aggressive practices to collect on unpaid medical bills. More than two-thirds have policies that allow them to sue patients or take other legal actions against them, such as garnishing wages.This includes high-profile medical centers such as the Mayo Clinic. Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
In 2013, Grace E. Elliott spent a night in a hospital in Florida for a kidney infection that was treated with antibiotics. Eight years later, she got a large bill from the health system that bought the hospital. This bill was for an unrelated surgical procedure she didn't need and never received. It was a case of mistaken identity, she knew, but proving that wasn't easy. Shelby Knowles for KHN hide caption
Dr. Eckart Rolshoven examines a patient at his clinic in Püttlingen, a small town in Germany's Saarland region. Although Germany has a largely private health care system, patients pay nothing out-of-pocket when they come to see him. Pasquale D'Angiolillo for KHN hide caption
Lucy Greco (left), a web-accessibility specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, is blind. She reads most of her documents online, but employs Liza Schlosser-Olroyd as an aide to sort through her paper mail every other month, to make sure Greco hasn't missed a bill or other important correspondence. Shelby Knowles for KHN hide caption
Jerry Bilinski, a retired social worker who lives in Fayetteville, N.C., says he deserves a full explanation from his medical team of what led to a small gash on his forehead during his surgery for a cataract. Eamon Queeney for KHN hide caption
He woke up from eye surgery with a gash on his forehead. What happened?
