Caitlin Wells Salerno expected the bill for Gus’ birth to be heftier than that for her first child, Hank, which had cost the family a mere $30. She was a postdoctoral fellow in California with top-notch insurance when Hank was born, about four years earlier. They were braced to pay more for Gus, but how…

or parents living in poverty, “diaper math” is a familiar and distressingly pressing daily calculation. Babies in the U.S. go through six to 10 disposable diapers a day, at an average cost of $70 to $80 a month. Name-brand diapers with high-end absorption sell for as much as a half a dollar each, and can…

At the height of the covid-19 pandemic, people often relied on telemedicine for doctor visits. Now, insurers are betting that some patients liked it enough to embrace new types of health coverage that encourages video visits — or outright insists on them.

Across the country, growing numbers of transplant programs have chosen to either bar patients who refuse to take the widely available covid vaccines from receiving transplants, or give them lower priority on crowded organ waitlists.

In June 2020, an employee tested positive. That sent Travis Warner and his wife on their own hunt for a test. Because of limited testing availability at the time, they drove 30 minutes from their home in Dallas to a free-standing emergency room in Lewisville, Texas. They received PCR diagnostic tests and rapid antigen tests.

Night Shift work not only disrupts your sleep schedule, but it could also increase your risk of having an irregular heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation (AFib), as well as coronary heart disease, according to new research.

Until the delta variant laid siege this summer, nearly all children seemed to be spared from the worst ravages of covid, for reasons scientists didn’t totally understand. Although there’s no evidence the delta variant causes more severe disease, the virus is so infectious that children are being hospitalized in large numbers — mostly in states with…

Many more people could benefit from ECMO than are receiving it, which has made for a messy triaging of treatment that could escalate in the coming weeks as the delta variant surges across the South and in rural communities with low vaccination rates.

After a difficult year or more of virtual learning, parents are eager to have their children back in classrooms. But even as the highly transmissible delta variant surges, school districts like Daniels’ aren’t beefing up protocols to prevent infections. Masks aren’t mandated or enforced, according to teachers, parents and officials in several states. Physical distancing…

Ely Bair had the first surgery, on his upper jaw, in 2018 at Swedish Medical Center, First Hill Campus in Seattle. The surgery was covered by his Premera Blue Cross plan, and Bair’s out-of-pocket hospital expense was $3,000. He changed jobs in 2019 but still had Premera health insurance. In 2020, he had the planned surgery…