In 2015, Houston police officers stepped into Alan Pean’s hospital room, closed the door and shot him through the chest. Nearly six years later, his survival has brought the Pean family a wrenching legacy and conflicted sense of purpose.
The Biden administration has started to speed efforts to reverse health policies forged under Donald Trump. Most recently, the administration overturned a ban on fetal tissue research and canceled a last-minute extension of a Medicaid waiver for Texas. That latter move may delay the Senate confirmation of President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Medicare and Medicaid programs, as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) seeks to fight back. Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Rachel Cohrs of Stat and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
California stresses equity for minority groups. Texas is all about personal choice and liberty. Both are struggling to vaccinate Latinos and contending with vaccine hesitancy among conservative communities.
For some, a vaccine appointment a few hours away is no biggie. For others, it’s a major barrier to gaining protection from the coronavirus.
As the recent winter storm disaster in Texas showed, many long-term care sites aren’t required to have backup power supplies or other redundancies to keep residents safe when disaster strikes.
Spiritual leaders risk their own lives and health to tend to covid’s victims and their loved ones.
In the hours before President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the Federal Emergency Management Agency allowed a Texas mask maker to ship the high-quality masks overseas.
The east side of Austin has few of the chain stores key to the Texas vaccination plan. But local officials have done pop-up vaccination events in the community to get more shots to Blacks and Latinos.
Hospitals dealing with staff shortages during the current covid surge are unable to tap into one valuable resource: foreign-trained doctors, nurses and other health workers, many with experience treating infectious diseases. Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Nevada are the only states to have eased credentialing requirements during the pandemic.
In some parts of the country, the surge in covid cases is overwhelming coroners, morgues, funeral homes and religious leaders. It has required ingenuity and even changed the rituals of honoring the dead.