KFF Health News

Federal health authorities have taken the “unprecedented” step of instructing states to investigate certain individuals on Medicaid to determine whether they are ineligible because of their immigration status, with five states reporting they’ve received more than 170,000 names collectively.

The hospital kept her overnight, but her insurer stopped paying after she left the ER.

More than a dozen states, including Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, New York, and most of New England, have enacted laws in recent years to keep medical debt from affecting consumers’ credit.

Health care providers and debt collectors are biting from people’s paychecks to cover old medical bills. A KFF Health News investigation in Colorado shows that this aggressive collection practice is widespread even in a state considered to have strong consumer protections.

Even if people qualify for financial help with their hospital bills, the care they receive may not be covered.

The Trump administration’s cuts of public health funds to state and local health departments had vastly uneven effects depending on the political leanings of where someone lives, a new KFF Health News analysis shows.

Colorado, California, and Montana have passed neural data privacy laws meant to prevent the exploitation of brain information collected by consumer products.

A Colorado bill banning surprise billing for ambulance rides passed unanimously in both legislative chambers, only to be met with a veto from the governor. As more states pass such legislation, some are hitting the same snag — concerns about raising premiums.

Republicans, on the hunt for spending cuts, are eyeing a special kind of Medicaid tax that nearly every state uses to boost funding for hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers.

In many cases, the money flowed to addiction recovery programs that help rebuild lives by driving people to medical appointments and court hearings, crafting résumés and training them for new jobs, finding them housing, and helping them build social connections unrelated to drugs.

The Latino communities who make up significant proportions of year-round populations in Colorado’s mountain towns already experience heightened mental health concerns. Now, deportation fears are increasing their stress.

Colorado was long considered a haven for gender-affirming care. But under this Trump administration, hospitals in the state have limited the treatments available for people under 19. Some services have been restored, but trans youth and their families say the state isn’t the rock they thought it was.

Psilocybin licenses are going out as the state’s new psychedelic landscape takes shape.

Hospital-based violence intervention programs have operated in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. The public health approach to gun violence works, by many accounts. But recent moves by the White House are raising anxiety about the programs’ future.

Colorado’s new tax is what economists call a “Pigouvian” tax, which seeks to compensate financially for the societal toll or damage a product causes.

Corneas, the windshields of the eye, are the most transplanted part of the human body. But four former employees at Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank told of numerous retrieval problems, including damage to eyes and removal from the wrong body.