Recent Articles

Sometime in August, Patricia Holland will drop into Medicare's dreaded doughnut hole. She is already bracing for that financial wallop. Holland, 67, of Centreville, Md., regularly takes seven prescription medications. One of them -- Entocort -- is especially expensive. It prevents severe attacks...

Every weekday, Betsy Langston makes a 90-minute drive with her son to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Then, after about three hours there, she drives the same 90 minutes back home to Florence. That's $20 a day in gas, not to mention the wear on her station wagon and herself. "It gets really tiring,'' Langston...

Even though it was 5:45 a.m. on a Saturday in Maryville, Tenn., the high school cafeteria had the low buzz of a student lunch period. A cadre of local volunteers sat at a row of 25 computers. Nurses waited for triage duty at tables. Other health professionals, coffee in hand, headed to their...

Robin Lauderdale traveled to a free clinic last weekend for a general medical checkup. She suffered a stroke a year earlier, and her blood pressure now was running high, she said. Lauderdale, 43, of Lenoir City, Tenn., cleans houses for a living. Self-employed, she has no health insurance....

If nothing else, the health care reform debate has produced a reliable punching bag: the insurance companies. Lawmakers, consumer groups, and journalists (me included) have inflicted a flurry of blows upon insurers' collective chin -- for their huge rate increases, for dropping people from...

Annie and Doug Schulte each have health insurance through their jobs. She works for a tiny nonprofit, and he is a truck driver. But neither of their employers offers coverage for children. As a result, their son, A.J., 16, is uninsured. That's a constant worry for his parents. "You always have...

A routine dental cleaning now may come with an unexpected option: an HIV test. Some dental locations, especially in New York City, are offering HIV screenings to patients through a fast and inexpensive oral test. Dental clinics have screened hundreds of patients with the OraQuick Advance HIV...

At 63, Billie Hoke is two years and a ton of worry away from the health care goal line. She will have to wait until 2011 to join the millions of Americans in the Medicare program for people 65 and older. Medicare provides relatively inexpensive -- and very secure -- coverage through the federal...

Patients in hospices and nursing homes are suffering needlessly because they cannot get pain medicines, medical care professionals say. The issue: A combination of regulatory changes, manufacturing snags and physicians' reluctance to prescribe the drugs in light of a growing number of abuses of...

When I arrived at the hospital, my father lay unconscious in the intensive care unit. A staff member was able to waken him. He opened his eyes and, recognizing me, moved his hand toward mine. Then he quickly lapsed back into an unconscious state. My father was 88 and had multiple health problems:...