KHN

Back-to-school season has fueled immediate covid outbreaks. Instead of beefing up protections, some districts are letting students go without masks, physical distancing and quarantines. And parents are left to make impossibly tough decisions.

Two days before hosting an outdoor Wilco concert, the St. Louis Music Park announced it would require proof of vaccination or a negative covid test for all ticket holders, sending some attendees scrambling and upending plans. Concertgoers, promoters and venues nationwide are all having to pivot quickly to find safer ways of enjoying live music amid the pandemic’s delta surge.

Zoom in on states with overall good vaccination rates and you see a checkerboard effect, with rural areas far lagging urban zones. That’s allowed the pandemic to rage in places like Jackson County, Oregon, overwhelming hospitals.

Reproductive rights groups and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom argue that Californians’ access to abortion would be threatened if he is recalled. But a replacement governor’s power to restrict access to the procedure would be limited.

A Seattle patient discovers the hard way that you can still hit a lifetime limit for certain types of care. And health plans can vary a lot from one job to the next, even if the insurer is the same.

Seattle’s Northwest Kidney Centers, which pioneered kidney failure treatment 50 years ago, now pairs dying patients with hospice services, without forcing them to forgo the comfort dialysis can provide.

Efforts by states and the private health plans that many states pay to cover low-income Americans has been scattershot and hampered by a lack of data.

As covid case numbers rise nationwide, Georgia and some other states have restricted the case count data they share publicly.

A 2017 law designed to help lower the cost of hearing aids mandated that federal officials set rules for a new class of devices consumers could buy without needing to see an audiologist. But those regulations are still on hold.

The FDA’s formal approval of the first vaccine to prevent covid-19 may or may not prompt doubters to go out and get shots, but it has clearly prompted employers to make vaccination a work requirement. Meanwhile, moderates and liberals in the U.S. House put aside their differences long enough to keep a giant social-spending bill on track, at least for now. Joanne Kenen of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.

Some counties are changing their covid quarantine policies in line with a law that bans discrimination based on a person’s vaccine status. But one county has decided to defy the rule.

Missouri’s ambitious school testing plan landed with a thud. What it can teach us now about keeping the delta variant out of classrooms.

A raft of startups are charging consumers hundreds of dollars to analyze the microbes in their gut and offer dietary advice based on the results. But scientists say scant research has been done, and as customers of one company have learned the hard way, the experience isn’t always smooth.

Despite widespread consensus on the importance of addiction treatment in the ER, many hospitals fail to screen for substance use, offer medications to treat opioid use disorder or connect patients to follow-up care. But some are working to change that.

The man famous for taking on Big Tobacco in the ’90s, and winning, launched a series of ill-fated national lawsuits against nonprofit hospitals. This episode is the first in a series looking at the origins of charity care.

College and grad students with chronic health conditions as common as asthma and diabetes may need to clear hurdles to make sure their health needs are covered by insurance if they go to school far from home.

Despite widespread consensus on the importance of addiction treatment in the ER, many hospitals fail to screen for substance use, offer medications to treat opioid use disorder or connect patients to follow-up care. But some are working to change that.

Governors in Southern states, amid a surge of delta-variant infections, are rushing to provide an experimental antibody cocktail therapy, even as they oppose measures like mask mandates and vaccine passports that health officials say can prevent infection in the first place.

This year, 23 states passed more than 70 pandemic-related provisions affecting nursing homes, including measures setting minimum staffing levels, expanding visitation protections and limiting owners’ profit margins.