Public Health news and information

Only half of people in the U.S. who have ever been infected with hepatitis C get proper testing for the liver-destroying disease, health officials said on Tuesday.
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California was an early booster of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law and was the first state to authorize a health insurance exchange in 2010. It also was quick to commit to the optional Medicaid expansion that has been rejected by some Republican states.
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Allison Guarino understands the controversy over new rules allowing 15-year-olds to buy the morning-after pill without a prescription. But as someone who teaches pregnancy prevention to ninth-graders in Boston, she thinks lowering the age will "help the girls who need the help the most."
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Sixty years ago, the late American crime novelist Mickey Spillane published Kiss Me, Deadly, which could also serve as the title of a new analysis from the University of California at Berkeley's School of Public Health.
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Mountain States Health Alliance, which operates 12 hospitals in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, will join Vanderbilt University Medical Center's network of affiliated hospitals.
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If you're uninsured, getting on Medicaid clearly improves your mental health, but it doesn't seem to make much difference in physical conditions such as high blood pressure.
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While recent research showed small, rural hospitals registered worse mortality outcomes than their larger urban and suburban counterparts, they fare no worse than their larger counterparts on mortality following common, low-risk surgical procedures, such as appendectomy and knee replacement.
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In its newly released proposed inpatient hospital payment rule for 2014, the CMS plans a slew of performance-based payment changes, including a penalty program for hospital-acquired conditions and updates to the agency's readmissions reduction program that would expand the parameters for...
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With the Senate's gun-control legislation stalled—and mental health provisions along with it—behavioral healthcare advocates wonder whether tying the issues together is the right approach.
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And in other culinary danger news, steer clear of the cinnamon challenge. That's the advice from doctors in a new report about a dangerous prank depicted in popular YouTube videos that has led to hospitalizations and a surge in calls to U.S. poison centers.
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