The pandemic-caused recession and a federal requirement that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled until the national emergency ends swelled the pool of people in the program by more than 9 million over the past year, according to a report released Thursday.

The latest figures show Medicaid enrollment grew from 71.3 million in February 2020, when the pandemic was beginning in the U.S., to 80.5 million in January, according to a KFF analysis of federal data. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

That’s up from about 56 million in 2013, just before many states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. And it’s double the 40 million enrolled in 2001.

Medicaid, once considered the ugly duckling compared with the politically powerful and popular Medicare program, now covers nearly 1 in 4 Americans. In New Mexico, the ratio is more than 1 in 3.

Together, Medicaid and Medicare cover 43% … Read the rest

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Dr. Leora Horwitz treats fewer and fewer covid patients at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. Still, she thinks there are too many.

And they almost all have something in common.

“I’ve only had one patient who was vaccinated, and he was being treated for cancer with chemotherapy,” she said, reflecting recent research on the vaccines’ limited effectiveness for cancer patients. “Everyone else hasn’t been vaccinated.”

While taking care of those seriously ill with covid, she asks patients, with sympathy and respect: Why not get vaccinated? A few of them told the internist and hospital researcher that they’re concerned about vaccine safety. But mainly, she said, the responses break down into two groups: One comprises people who have been planning to get vaccinated but didn’t get around to it yet. The second highlights a disturbing deficiency in the pandemic response: those eager to get vaccinated but unable to … Read the rest

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For more than a year, public health officials have repeatedly told us that masks save lives. They’ve warned us to keep our distance from our neighbors, who’ve morphed into disease vectors before our eyes.

Now they are telling us that if we’re vaccinated, we no longer need to wear masks or physically distance ourselves in most cases — even indoors. To many people, myself included, this seems hard to reconcile with so many long months of masking and physical distancing and sacrificing our social lives for fear of covid-19.

What is an anxious, pandemic-weary (and wary) soul to do?

First, it’s important to stress that the dramatic rollback of mask-wearing and physical distancing recommended last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a policy California has adopted starting Tuesday as part of a broader reopening — applies only to people who have been fully vaccinated.

Even if … Read the rest

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Cuando Kiki Radermacher, terapeuta de salud mental, llegó a una casa de Missoula, Montana, por una llamada de emergencia al 911 a fines de mayo, el hombre que había pedido ayuda estaba atrincheado en una esquina, gritándole a los policías.

 La casa que estaba alquilando iba a venderse. Había llamado al 911 cuando el miedo de quedarse sin hogar lo hizo tener pensamientos suicidas.

“Le pregunté: ‘¿Quieres sentarte conmigo?’”, recordó Radermacher, miembro del equipo móvil de respuesta a crisis de la ciudad. Luego ayudó al hombre a encontrar un servicio de apoyo. “Realmente queremos empoderar a las personas para encontrar soluciones”.

Missoula comenzó a enviar a este equipo especial en llamadas de emergencia de salud mental en noviembre como un proyecto piloto, y el próximo mes el programa se volverá permanente.

Es una de las seis iniciativas de respuesta móviles a crisis en Montana, que comenzó como una prueba en … Read the rest

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SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colo. — A woman with pregnancy complications needed permission from her boss to visit a doctor. Community health volunteers were turned away from delivering food and covid information to worker housing. A farmworker had a serious allergic reaction but was afraid to seek treatment.

To Nicole Civita, policy director with Colorado advocacy group Project Protect Food Systems Workers, such stories encapsulate an entrenched power dynamic that covid-19 has brought into focus: Farmworkers are “essential but treated as expendable,” including when it comes to accessing health care.

Her organization is one of many that supported Colorado legislation dubbed the Farmworker Bill of Rights. Among its provisions is a requirement that the more than 3,000 Colorado farmworkers who live in employer-provided housing be able to visit, or be visited by, medical professionals and community health workers. Employers must also provide transportation to medical visits for those without vehicles. The … Read the rest

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It took covid-19 to give millions of Americans the option of telling their doctor about their aches and pains by phone.

But now that more doctors and patients are returning to in-person appointments, policymakers across the country are divided over how much taxpayer money to keep spending on phone appointments. Although they were a lifeline for Medicaid and Medicare patients who don’t have the technology for video visits, critics say they don’t provide the same level of patient care and aren’t worth the same price.

In California, the Democratic-controlled legislature wants the state’s Medicaid program for low-income people — called Medi-Cal — to keep paying for phone calls at the same rate as for video and in-person visits, a policy that began during the pandemic. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget plan directs Medi-Cal to reduce the rate.

Medi-Cal paid for a whopping 2.4 million phone appointments from March 1, … Read the rest

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Promise: “Double the number of drive-through testing sites, invest in next-generation testing, including at home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.”

Before vaccinations were widely available, covid-19 tests were considered one of the few tools to help control the spread of the coronavirus.

That’s why then-candidate Joe Biden promised during the 2020 presidential campaign to boost the United States’ testing capacity as one way he would “beat covid-19.”

Specifically, Biden’s campaign website promised that, if elected, he would “double the number of drive-through testing sites” and “invest in next-generation testing, including at-home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.”

KHN has teamed up with our partners at PolitiFact to analyze Biden’s promises during the 2020 presidential campaign. Now that Biden has been president almost five months, we checked how he has … Read the rest

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Labor Department officials on Thursday announced a temporary emergency standard to protect health care workers, saying they face “grave danger” in the workplace from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The new standard would require employers to remove workers who have covid-19 from the workplace, notify workers of covid exposure at work and strengthen requirements for employers to report worker deaths or hospitalizations to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“These are the workers who continue to go into work day in and day out to take care of us, to save our lives,” said Jim Frederick, acting assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health. “And we must make sure we do everything in our power to return the favor to protect them.”

The new rules are set to take effect immediately after publication in the Federal Register and are expected to affect about 10.3 million health care workers nationwide.… Read the rest

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