Health

Attacks on medical facilities jeopardize health care not only for those injured by fighting, but also for all those with routine medical needs. On Thursday, Doctors Without Borders (also known as M.S.F., an abbreviation for its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières) withdrew a surgical team from a hospital in Sudan after military authorities blocked all delivery of supplies to the facility. The team had been providing lifesaving trauma surgeries and cesarean sections from one of the last functioning hospitals in the capital, Khartoum.“It’s so painful, because of the moral distress of the medics,” Mr. Hofman said. They were unable to…

One day in February, an invitation from Harvard University arrived in the inbox of Rachel Havekost, a TikTok mental health influencer and part-time bartender in Seattle who likes to joke that her main qualification is 19 years of therapy.The same email arrived for Trey Tucker, a.k.a. @ruggedcounseling, a therapist from Chattanooga, Tenn., who discusses attachment styles on his TikTok account, sometimes while loading bales of hay onto the bed of a pickup truck.The invitations also made their way to Bryce Spencer-Jones, who talks his viewers through breakups while gazing tenderly into the camera, and to Kate Speer, who narrates her…

Quetcy M. Lozada, a first-term Philadelphia City Council member, stood on a September evening near an elementary school just off Kensington Avenue, the epicenter of a sprawling fentanyl market in a city that saw a record 1,413 drug overdose deaths last year.Just a block away, the street and sidewalks were dotted with used syringes and their discarded orange caps.“Kids have to go through this every day,” Ms. Lozada said, her voice rising. Children “are so impacted that they don’t want to come to school.”Public health experts have long endorsed a controversial strategy to blunt the opioid epidemic that has been…

Jump to:Medicare — the federally funded health care program — has been in place since 1965. Since then, an expanding array of Medicare Advantage plans have become available. Last year, the typical beneficiary could choose from 43 Advantage plans, KFF has reported.Medicare Advantage plans, like traditional Medicare, are funded by the federal government, but they are offered though private insurance companies, which receive a set payment for each enrollee. The idea is to help control costs by allowing these insurers, who must cover the same services as traditional Medicare, to keep some of the federal payment as profit if they…