Listen: The Kids are Reading the News with JJ Janikis & Tami Flood of Newsela

Medicare Advantage was sold as a smarter, more efficient way to care for seniors, but too often the efficiency seems to land on the wrong side of the patient–provider relationship. When plans deny or delay needed services through opaque rules and weak oversight, beneficiaries feel it first—in missed therapies, postponed procedures, and a…

Behind the sterile labels of “inpatient” versus “observation” care is a messy reality: clinicians and insurers often enter peer-to-peer reviews without a shared rulebook, turning what should be a clinical dialogue into a box-checking exercise. The speaker’s frustration points to a broader problem in U.S. healthcare utilization management—decisions about coverage can feel pre-decided,…

A physician advisor recently described a case that should unsettle anyone who cares about fair, clinically grounded coverage decisions: a Medicaid patient arrived comatose from an overdose, was emergently intubated, developed aspiration pneumonia, and stayed through three midnights before leaving against medical advice. By any bedside standard, this is acute, unstable care—exactly what…

America’s healthcare system is buckling under a contradiction we’ve normalized: we expect reliable care for roughly 380 million people while letting every major lever of the system be pulled by for-profit players chasing the same dollar. In any market, companies will optimize for profit, but in medicine that instinct collides with a rulebook…