Vice President Kamala Harris outlined a new proposal for home health care on “The View” on Tuesday, describing a Medicare expansion plan that she said would help what is called the “sandwich generation” to take care of aging parents.That constituency includes many adults who find themselves straddling the responsibility of rearing their children at the same time that their parents need more assistance to stay at home.“There are so many people who are right in the middle,” said Ms. Harris on the ABC talk show. She recalled caring for her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, before she died of cancer in 2009. “It’s about dignity for that individual. It’s about independence for that individual,” she said.Home health services that last more than a few months represent “the biggest gap in Medicare,” said David Grabowksi, a health policy professor at Harvard who studies long-term care. Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor, covers home care for elderly and disabled Americans who need it, but people are forced to spend all their savings to qualify and often face long waiting periods.The Harris campaign said that the plan would be paid for with savings from the expansion of Medicare price negotiations with drug manufacturers, which is expected to lower government spending for older people’s prescriptions. But it is not clear how much the additional benefits under the Harris plan would cost.“This would be transformative from a care perspective,” Mr. Grabowski said, but he added that the price could be very high. “There will be a lot of sticker shock once this is costed out.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A survey by the C.D.C. found high rates of sadness, bullying and suicide attempts among transgender and gender-questioning teenagers.About 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to the first nationally representative survey on these groups, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday.Transgender and gender-questioning teenagers reported alarmingly higher rates of bullying at school, persistent sadness and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, according to the survey, which was carried out in 2023. About one in four transgender students said they had attempted suicide in the past year, compared with 11 percent of cisgender girls and 5 percent of cisgender boys.“We have 5 percent of young people in the country who, because of the way they identify around their gender, are stigmatized, bullied, made to feel unsafe, feel disconnected at school and consequently have poorer mental health and higher risk for suicide than their cisgender peers,” said Kathleen Ethier, the director of C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health division. “That’s just heartbreaking.”The data come from the agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a survey of more than 20,000 high school students conducted in public and private schools across the country every two years. The 2023 survey was the first to ask teenagers in all schools whether they identified as transgender.This small group of young people has drawn outsize and often harsh political attention across the country. The survey data were collected during a record year of legislation related to transgender issues. Around two dozen states have passed laws limiting bathroom use, sports participation or access to medical treatments for transgender children under 18.In the C.D.C.’s survey, transgender and gender-questioning students reported feeling worse than even cisgender girls, who have drawn national attention to a crisis in mental health among young people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Both have campaigned for lower prescription costs. Kamala Harris has promised to expand President Biden’s policies. Donald Trump is a wild card.Insulin for $35 a month. A limit of $2,000 a year in out-of-pocket drug costs for older Americans. Billions of dollars in savings for Medicare resulting from drug negotiations.Whether these policies expand or, in the case of the negotiations, survive at all may be determined by the election in November.Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has vowed to extend President Biden’s policies to more drugs and more Americans. She plans to use savings from expanding negotiations to help pay for a sweeping new proposal that would cover long-term care at home for people on Medicare.Former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, is a wild card. He has offered few specifics about what he would do on drug pricing.Last week, he reversed his position on a policy he had proposed in his first term that rattled pharmaceutical companies: tying drug prices to what other wealthy countries pay. In a second term, he would face pressure from some Republicans to undo Mr. Biden’s Medicare negotiation program — although he once promoted the same thing.Drug pricing has not featured prominently in a presidential campaign that has been dominated by immigration, abortion and the economy. Mr. Trump, in particular, rarely talks about the issue. Nor is it top of mind for many voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Vice President Kamala Harris outlined a new proposal for home health care on ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday, a plan for expanding Medicare coverage aimed at helping what is called the “sandwich generation” take care of their aging parents.Many adults find themselves straddling the dual responsibilities of rearing their children at a time when their parents need more assistance to stay at home.And millions of Americans struggle to find affordable home care for themselves or their loved ones as they become older. Medicare, the federal insurance program for older Americans, does not cover long-term care and will generally pay for a home aide only if a patient is recovering from an acute medical condition, like a stroke, and only for a short time, often just a few months.While Medicaid will pay for a home aide if someone is poor or has no assets, there are long waiting lists to qualify. And in many areas of the country, there is a severe shortage of workers because of low wages and better, less stressful jobs in other businesses.Most people have no choice but to rely on a family member to care for them because they cannot afford the cost of care, which can surpass the expense of an assisted living facility. Agencies can charge about $30 an hour, according to Genworth, a long-term care insurance company. Others end up spending most of their assets and seeking care in a nursing home, where Medicaid does not have waiting lists.Judy Feder, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, who published a recent paper on a possible Medicare home-care benefit, said such a policy would fill a major gap in Medicare, and relieve financial and physical burdens on family members. The private market for long-term care insurance has not functioned well, she said: “It’s a catastrophic, unpredictable event for which you need insurance.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

More than a dozen states sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an app designed to be addictive to children and teens.Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teens while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.In separate lawsuits, a bipartisan group of attorneys general cited internal company documents to paint a picture of a multibillion dollar company that knowingly contributed to a mental health crisis among American teenagers to maximize its advertising revenue. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.TikTok “knew the harms to children,” Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general of California, said in an interview. “They chose addiction and more use and more eyeballs and more mental and physical harm for our young people in order to get profits — it’s really that simple.”The lawsuits add to a rapidly expanding list of challenges for TikTok in the United States, which now counts 170 million monthly U.S. users. A federal law passed in April calls for the app to be banned in the United States as of January unless it is sold. A federal lawsuit against the company in August also claimed that TikTok allowed children to open accounts, gathered information about them and made it difficult for their parents to delete the accounts.TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The states, many of which started investigating the company’s harms to minors in early 2022, are generally claiming that TikTok’s conduct violates their consumer protection laws. The states say that TikTok plays videos in a manner that aims to make young users lose track of time and sends them round-the-clock notifications and ephemeral content like livestreams to compel them to keep checking in. The longer users stay on the app, the more targeted ads TikTok is able to show them.The attorneys general say that TikTok has misled users about its so-called 60-minute screen time limits for young people and other features that promise to curate the videos that they see.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Lara Stevens says endometriosis is like the cancer she had as a child, with the potential to spread and damage multiple organs – but feels it is not treated with the required urgency.

BBCDorothy Masasa happily walks down a dirt road on a sunny afternoon, her baby securely strapped on her back.

Family handout/PA MediaA coroner has highlighted the lack of specialist care for patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) after the death of a 27-year-old woman.

Covid InquiryA mother of premature twins has told the Covid inquiry she did not feel like she was treated as a parent after giving birth in the early stages of the pandemic.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 has been awarded to US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on microRNA.