3 Policy Moves Likely to Change Health Care for Older People
This article follows how three recent policy shifts—rolling back nursing home staffing standards, reversing wage protections for home care workers, and introducing AI-driven prior authorization into traditional Medicare—are reshaping care for older adults. What makes it especially powerful is how it centers the cost to us all. Residents in understaffed facilities, caregivers pushed further to the margins, and patients now facing algorithm-assisted barriers to treatment. It lays out how decades of advocacy were undone almost overnight and raises urgent questions about who bears the burden when efficiency and deregulation take priority over lived experience. (from nytimes.com)
Fearing ICE crackdown, immigrants nationally are avoiding treatment, sometimes with dire consequences
This devastating report follows clinicians who are watching patients disappear in real time. Some are skipping prenatal visits, missing vaccinations, or delaying emergency care out of fear of immigration enforcement. The stories are hard to read: a stillbirth after a mother avoided care for her entire pregnancy, children arriving sicker than they should be, parents too afraid to leave home sending neighbors to the ER instead. While hospitals are scrambling to adapt with telehealth, home visits, and outreach, physicians lament the erosion of trust and safety, and how right now it only seems to be growing. (from statnews.com)
The Role of Doctors Is Changing Forever
After reading about families avoiding care out of fear of ICE, this essay feels like the wider frame around that same fracture. Physician-writer Dhruv Khullar reflects on what it means to practice medicine in a world where trust is eroding, authority is decentralized, and patients increasingly turn to social media, AI, and direct-to-consumer care before they ever see a clinician. He traces how medicine’s cultural role is being unbundled by technology, politics, wellness capitalism, and long-standing gaps in access, and makes a powerful case for reinvention. Not a return to gatekeeping, but a return to presence. Both articles underscore an essential point: care always begins with trust. (from newyorker.com)
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