Federal health officials are proposing an extensive set of tougher rules governing private Medicare Advantage health plans, in response to wide-scale complaints that too many patients’ medical claims have been wrongly denied and that marketing of the plans is deceptive. Medicare Advantage is the private-sector alternative to the federal program covering those 65 and over…
Updated booster shots have bolstered Americans’ defenses against serious Covid, reducing the risk of hospitalization by roughly 50 percent compared with certain groups inoculated with the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in a pair of studies published on Friday. The research represents the agency’s first look at how the reformulated…
For almost a month now, Sean Merriam has been walking around town with a stuffy nose and a mysterious cough that keeps clattering in his lungs. He knows it’s not Covid, because he tests regularly, and it’s not the flu, which he recovered from a few weeks ago. The culprit may be the respiratory syncytial…
“The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated America’s vulnerability to catastrophic public health crises, and it highlighted the urgency of taking reasonable measures to prevent them in the future,” Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in an email. “The next public health crisis is already here: the emergence of bacteria resistant…
For generations of most American families, getting children vaccinated was just something to check off on the list of back-to-school chores. But after the ferocious battles over Covid shots of the past two years, simmering resistance to general school vaccine mandates has grown significantly. Now, 35 percent of parents oppose requirements that children receive routine…
I was trying to have an experience and ended up having a life.
LONDON — Nurses across Britain went on strike on Thursday for the first time in the 74-year history of the National Health Service, underscoring critical challenges facing the long-revered system after years of underfunding and as the government contends with a burgeoning fiscal crisis. On a bitterly cold day, nurses and their supporters walked on…
Patients lingered for hours on gurneys with serious, time-sensitive problems. Surgeries were delayed. Other patients developed bed sores — gaping wounds that for frail patients can be deadly — because they were not repositioned often enough. “You feel awful because you know you’re not turning these patients,” said Jillian Wahlfors, a nurse at Genesys. “You…
“As with all medical specialties, there is room for improvement in the diagnostic accuracy of emergency care,” Dr. Kang added. “All of us who practice emergency medicine are committed to improving care and reducing diagnostic error.” Doctors say addressing diagnostic errors is challenging. While the National Academy of Medicine identified medical errors as a critical…
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Thursday restarted a program that provides free coronavirus tests to American households through the Postal Service, part of a new push by the government to head off rises in virus cases and hospitalizations as winter approaches. The program, which was paused in September after distributing over 600 million tests,…