Health Insurance and Medicare News & Features

The percentage of families who had problems paying medical expenses in the previous year declined from about 20% in 2011 to 14% in 2018, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Two million more Americans didn't seek health care from late 2016 through 2017 because they couldn't afford it and/or lacked insurance, new research shows.

DPC Frontier, which tracks the number of direct primary care practices nationally, estimates there are 1,219 practices in 48 states and Washington, D.C. They range in size from solo practitioners to corporate, multisite direct primary care organizations with thousands of doctors.

Nearly half of Americans (44%) said either they or a family member had received at least one surprise medical bill in the past, and most of them worried about how they would pay for it

Instead, the appeals court sent the case back to a federal district judge in Texas to "conduct a more searching inquiry" into which parts of the health law could survive without the insurance requirement.

There's been a lot of debate and discussion about a health insurance plan known as Medicare for All. But what does that really mean?

Even with Medicare coverage, older Americans with serious health conditions are often burdened by medical bills, a new study finds.

Genomic tests on cancer cells can help determine which types of treatment might work, and which ones might not. However, such testing can be expensive, and not all tests and related treatments are covered by health insurance, the researchers noted.

Meanwhile, about 27.5 million people (8.5% of the population) lacked health insurance for all of 2018, up from 7.9% in 2017, which was the first increase since the Affordable Care Act took full effect in 2014.

An exemption that allows immigrants to remain in the United States and avoid deportation while they or family members receive life-saving care has been scrapped by the Trump administration.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, claimed the No. 1 spot in the annual honor roll of best hospitals published today by U.S. News & World Report.

There's a severe organ shortage, which could impede the push for more transplants. In order to tackle that problem, the administration wants to ease financial challenges for living donors.

The median charge of an air ambulance trip was $39,000 in 2016, about 60% more than the $24,000 charged just four years earlier, researchers found.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order he said would make it easier for consumers to get prices for hospital services.

A Senate panel is scheduled to vote next week on legislation to close the loophole that allows such charges.

Compared with those 65 and older, adults aged 18 to 64 were more likely to say they had difficulty paying medical bills, worried about paying bills and delayed or went without care.

The scheme sold unneeded back, shoulder, wrist and knee braces to hundreds of thousands of seniors, using overseas calls centers to get Medicare numbers from beneficiaries, the Associated Press reported.

If the 2% reduction in the suicide rate had been steady in all the years of the study, about 8,000 fewer suicides would have occurred, the researchers estimated.

In 2017, the United States spent more than $10,700 per person on health care, according to federal data, CNN reported.

Repealing the Affordable Care Act could leave 20 million people uninsured, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

Uninsured patients were also more than twice as likely to be transferred to another hospital and 66% more likely to be discharged outright, compared with people with private insurance, the findings showed.

The Justice Department asks a federal appeals court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, then, hours later, House Democrats unveil proposals to bolster the law.

Nearly 1 in 5 of those prescribed drugs asked their doctors for less expensive options. The rate was highest -- 40 percent -- among people without insurance, CNN reported.

The Food and Drug Administration has let medical device companies file reports of injuries and malfunctions outside a widely scrutinized public database, leaving doctors and medical sleuths in the dark.

Physicians remain at increased risk for burnout relative to workers in other fields, but for the first time, researchers saw improvement burnout symptoms in physicians nationally.