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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Victoria Cooper pensaba que su consumo de alcohol en la universidad era como los de los demás. Shots en las fiestas, cervezas mientras jugaba al bowling. Tomaba más que otros y las resacas le hacían perder clases, pero así y todo pensaba que no tenía ningún problema.

“Según la imagen que tenía del alcoholismo —viejos embriagándose en un estacionamiento— yo pensaba que estaba bien”, dijo Cooper, que ahora está sobria y vive en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte.

Esa imagen de quiénes son los que sufren de alcoholismo, transmitida por la cultura pop, era engañosa hace más de una década, cuando Cooper estaba en la universidad. Y es aún menos representativa hoy en día.

Desde hace casi un siglo, las mujeres han ido cerrando la brecha de género en el consumo de alcohol, las borracheras y los trastornos que acarrea. Lo que antes era una proporción de 3 a 1, … Read the rest

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In the 1960s, health care across the Mississippi Delta was sparse and much of it was segregated. Some hospitals were dedicated to Black patients, but they often struggled to stay afloat. At the height of the civil rights movement, young Black doctors launched a movement of their own to address the care disparity.

“Mississippi was third-world and was so bad and so separated,” said Dr. Robert Smith. “The community health center movement was the conduit for physicians all over this country who believed that all people have a right to health care.”

In 1967, Smith helped start Delta Health Center, the country’s first rural community health center. They put the clinic in Mound Bayou, a small town in the heart of the Delta, in northwestern Mississippi. The center became a national model and is now one of nearly 1,400 such clinics across the country. These clinics, called federally qualified health … Read the rest

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This story also ran on Los Angeles Times. It can be republished for free.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Even as most states are trying to make it harder to get an abortion, California could make it free for more people.

State lawmakers are debating a bill to eliminate out-of-pocket expenses like copays and payments toward deductibles for abortions and related services, such as counseling. The measure, approved by the Senate and headed to the Assembly, would apply to most private health plans regulated by the state.

So far this year, 559 abortion restrictions have been introduced in 47 state legislatures, 82 of which have already been enacted, said Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research institute that studies abortion and reproductive health care. That’s already the third-highest number of abortion restrictions adopted in a year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling … Read the rest

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