"For months, officials in Republican-controlled Iowa had sought federal permission to revitalize their ailing health-insurance marketplace. Then President Trump read about the request in a newspaper story and called the federal director weighing the application. Trump’s message was clear, according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations: Tell Iowa no."
"Supporters of the Affordable Care Act see the president’s opposition even to changes sought by conservative states as part of a broader campaign by his administration to undermine the 2010 health-care law. In addition to trying to cut funding for the ACA, the Trump administration also is hampering state efforts to control premiums. In the case of Iowa, that involved a highly unusual intervention by the president himself."
"And with the fifth enrollment season set to begin Nov. 1, advocates say the Health and Human Services Department has done more to suppress the number of people signing up than to boost it. HHS has slashed grants to groups that help consumers get insurance coverage, for example. It also has cut the enrollment period in half, reduced the advertising budget by 90 percent and announced an outage schedule that would make the HealthCare.gov website less available than last year."
"The Senate is again trying to tackle the politics of health care. Rather than going for sweeping changes, lawmakers are acting more like handymen this time, looking for tweaks and fixes that will make the system that's already in place work better."
"The basic structure of the American health care system, in which most people have private insurance through their jobs, might seem historically inevitable, consistent with the capitalistic, individualist ethos of the nation."
"In truth, it was hardly preordained. In fact, the system is largely a result of one event, World War II, and the wage freezes and tax policy that emerged because of it. Unfortunately, what made sense then may not make as much right now."
"Since 1998, people all over the world have been living healthier and living longer. But middle-aged, white non-Hispanics in the United States have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers. The trend is being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less."
"When the tweeter-in-chief castigated Senate Republicans as “total quitters” for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, they showed zombie-like relentlessness in their determination to take health care away from millions of Americans, shambling forward despite devastating analyses by the Congressional Budget Office, denunciations of their plans by every major medical group, and overwhelming public disapproval."
"In a way, 911 is a victim of its own success. Most everyone knows to call in the case of an emergency, but plenty of people, and especially “frequent flyers,” use 911 as basic healthcare. The rate of non-life-threatening calls in Memphis is right at the national average, according to estimates from the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. “In the past, our model has always been, it doesn’t matter what the call is—we’re going to send an ambulance and we’re going to give you a ride to a hospital,” says Andrew Hart, division chief for Emergency Medical Services at the Memphis Fire Department."
"Since April, however, the city has been engaged in an experiment to take some pressure off the emergency dispatch system. A committee of civic, healthcare, and faith leaders launched a program called Rapid Assessment Decision And Redirection (RADAR). For weekday daytime calls that are very likely to be non-emergent in nature, Memphis partners with a faith-based organization, Resurrection Health, to steer residents away from the ER and send healthcare providers directly to them."
"A major study of thousands of Alzheimer's patients has discovered that many people diagnosed with the disease might not actually have it, The Washington Post reports. Researchers at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco found that of 4,000 patients tested for the disease's telltale amyloid plaques in the brain, just 54.3 percent of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and 70.5 percent of dementia patients actually had the hallmark."