New York Times: Self-Inflicted Medical Misery

By Paul Krugman | June 24, 2019 Over the weekend The Washington Post published a heart-rending description of a pop-up medical clinic in Cleveland, Tenn. — a temporary installation providing free care for two days on a first-come-first-served basis. Hundreds of people showed up many hours before the clinic opened, because rural America is suffering […]

Expanding KanCare can reduce need for foster care

By Christie Appelhanz | June 28, 2019 When we talk about the reasons to expand Medicaid (KanCare) in Kansas, most supporters mention boosting insurance rates or economic incentives. Those are valid, worthy reasons to expand KanCare eligibility. But when people ask me why I advocate for it, I think about Kansas children in or at […]

Register now for the Kansas Conference on Poverty

The Kansas Conference on Poverty brings together direct service workers, agency/department management, agency Boards of Directors, volunteers and anti-poverty advocates from Kansas’s non-profit organizations, faith-based agencies, and government offices. As such, we welcome a wide-variety of workshops – from highlighting anti-poverty services and programs to helping build agency capacity to focusing on advocacy and policy […]

Texas Versus the United States: Another Challenge to the Affordable Care Act

By Sheldon Weisgrau | June 18, 2019 Since passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, the law has faced a number of legal challenges, including several high profile cases that have been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. During the week of July 8, a federal appeals court in New Orleans will hear […]

Kansas is 30th in state-by-state ranking of health indicators

Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont are the top-ranked states in 2019 according to the Commonwealth Fund’s 2019 Scorecard on State Health System Performance, which assesses all 50 states and the District of Columbia on 47 measures of access to health care, quality of care, service use and costs of care, health outcomes, and […]

Kansans could lose coverage under federal proposal to change poverty measure

By Sheldon Weisgrau | June 11, 2019 As we focus on the fight to expand KanCare here in Kansas, it’s important that we not lose sight of activities at the federal level that will affect our efforts here at home. Recently, the Trump administration proposed a seemingly small technical change to the way the federal […]

Washington Post: ACA linked to reduced racial disparities, earlier diagnosis and treatment in cancer care

By Laurie McGinley | June 2, 2019 Proponents of the embattled Affordable Care Act got additional ammunition Sunday: New research links the law to a reduction in racial disparities in the care of cancer patients and to earlier diagnoses and treatment of ovarian cancer, one of the most dangerous malignancies. The findings, coming as health […]

In Medicaid Expansion States, More People Had Access to Opioid Overdose Reversal Drug

By Richard G. Frank and Carrie Fry | May 17, 2019 Federal, state, and local governments have taken steps to reduce deaths from opioid overdoses by expanding access to naloxone, a short-acting drug that reverses the effects of opioid-related overdoses. State Medicaid programs have played a key role by making naloxone affordable for low-income people […]