March 2024

‘If I don’t talk no one’s going to know’: Stories of pain from East Palestine move coalition members to action By Steve Mellon March 24, 2024   Lauri Harmon stepped from the crowd gathered in a community hall at the East Palestine Country Club around 2:30 on Saturday afternoon and told her story to a […]

Medicare Advantage in 2023: Enrollment Update and Key Trends By Nancy Ochieng, Jeannie Fuglesten Biniek, Meredith Freed, Anthony Damico, and Tricia Neuman August 09, 2023   Medicare Advantage enrollment has been on a steady climb for the past two decades following changes in policy designed to encourage a robust role for private plan options in

Liz Theoharis, This Can’t Be as “Good” as It Gets By Liz Theoharis March 10, 2024   It’s not complicated. This country, as TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign Liz Theoharis makes clear today, is simply unprepared — unprepared, that is, to keep all too many Americans even reasonably healthy and well.

2024 World Happiness Report: Happiest countries revealed, US fails to crack top 20 By Julia Gomez March 20, 2024  

World Happiness Report Appendices & Data 2024  

Nearly half of health systems are considering dropping Medicare Advantage plans By Andrew Cass March 22, 2024   “Onerous” authorization requirements and high denial rates have health systems considering whether to drop Medicare Advantage plans, according to a report from the Healthcare Financial Management Association and Eliciting Insights.   “HFMA Health System CFO Pain Points

Mortality in the United States, 2022 By Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A., Sherry L. Murphy, B.S., Jiaquan Xu, M.D., and Elizabeth Arias, Ph.D. March 2024   Key findings Data from the National Vital Statistics System Life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2022 was 77.5 years, an increase of 1.1 years from 2021. The age-adjusted death

Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget: 16 healthcare takeaways By Madeline Ashley, Kelly Gooch and Alexis Kayser March 11, 2024   President Joe Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget March 11, including various initiatives to lower healthcare costs and an $800 million investment in hospital cybersecurity protection.   16 healthcare takeaways:   1. Medicare. The proposed budget

BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DOCTOR: How Medicare Advantage care denials affect patients By Matthew Cunningham-Cook March 4, 2024   In 2023, insurance behemoth UnitedHealth spent $8 billion buying back its stock to juice its stock price—and its executive compensation, which is tied to the company’s stock price. It spent 39% more on stock buybacks in

Indigenous Americans — The Journal’s Historical “Indian Problem” By David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D., Moustafa Abdalla, M.D., D.Phil., and Joseph P. Gone, Ph.D. January 4, 2024   By the time the Journal was launched in 1812, Boston had witnessed two centuries of destructive confrontations between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Although some Indigenous communities persisted in