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Medicare is experimenting with how it pays for kidney transplants
The troubled U.S. kidney transplant system is about to get an overhaul. Or at least, half of it is. On July 1, 2025, a mandatory new payment structure for kidney transplants kicks in. The idea behind the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model is to determine whether financial incentives for hospitals lead to more transplants,…
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Worthless back surgeries are a nagging pain for U.S. health care
Hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries over a three-year period, according to an analysis by the Lown Institute, a health care watchdog group. The useless treatments put patients at risk for complications and cost Medicare about $2 billion, the analysis found. Furthermore, there was a large variation in rates of overuse among individual…
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Emergency department boarding: Covering the hidden horror story
Emergency department boarding is a horror story that’s largely hidden from public view. Very sick patients are held for hours or even days in the emergency department, often on a gurney in a hallway, waiting for an inpatient bed or transfer to another facility. As appropriate care is delayed, they experience avoidable pain and complications. …
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How to use national data to cover trends in severe maternal morbidity
Women giving birth in the U.S. die at an alarmingly high rate compared with other rich nations, but maternal death is tricky to measure because it’s rare, numbering in the hundreds per year. For journalists who want to track trends in the quality of maternal health, a more useful gauge may be the rate of severe…
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Reporter Max Blau explains insurance ghost networks
Many of us have been there. You get a long list of providers from your health plan only to find that many lead to a dead end. Some don’t take new patients or aren’t actually part of the insurer’s network. Others lack the required specialty. ProPublica reporter Max Blau recently wrote about how that bait-and-switch…
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How to educate your audience about disparities in care for people with disabilities
The pandemic illuminated the persistent bias against patients with disabilities, prompting the Biden administration to boost anti- discrimination protections in federal programs. Yet obtaining equitable care remains an often-silent struggle for people with disabilities, whom the National Council on Disability, a federal advisory group, called “the largest unrecognized minority group in this country.” Here are…
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How well is the public protected from bad doctors? A new analysis unveils alarming results
A new analysis indicates that thousands of dangerous doctors are slipping through the cracks due to lax enforcement by state medical boards. Wide variation in rates of serious disciplinary actions among the nation’s 64 state medical boards suggests that “many (if not most) boards are doing a dangerously lax job in enforcing their states’ medical…
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