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A new survey found that 11 percent of Americans said they could not pay for medication and medical treatments.It’s not just the high price of eggs or the rising cost of housing that is contributing to Americans’ unhappiness over the cost of living. Health care remains stubbornly unaffordable for millions of people, according to a new survey released Wednesday that underscores the struggle many people have in paying for a doctor’s visit or a prescription drug — even before any talk of cutting government coverage.In the survey, 11 percent of people said they could not afford medication and care within the past three months, the highest level in the four years the survey has been conducted. More than a third of those surveyed, representing some 91 million adults, said if they were to need medical care, they would not be able to pay for it.The survey, conducted from mid-November to late December 2024 by West Health and Gallup, also showed widening disparities for Black and Hispanic adults and for those making the least amount of money. A quarter of those with an annual household income of less than $24,000 said they could not afford or access care within the past three months.“The extent to which that has broadened and expanded really exposes how vulnerable these classes of individuals are,” Dan Witters, a senior researcher at Gallup, said.White adults and high earners said they experienced no real change in their ability to pay. Eight percent of white adults reported being unable to afford care, the same share as in 2021, according to the survey.Higher premiums, the added cost of going to the doctor and the recent rollback in Medicaid coverage have all contributed to making it harder for people to afford care. Health care costs continue to rise, and dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the elimination of tax subsidies that lower the cost of Obamacare plans, as discussed by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers, will likely exacerbate the problem, according to experts.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.

24 minutes ago

A few days ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, embarked on a media tour to defend his decision to lay off thousands of his department’s workers.He announced a plan last week to cut 10,000 jobs, in addition to the estimated 10,000 jobs cut through retirements and buyouts in the early weeks of the Trump administration.Mr. Kennedy had called the Health and Human Services Department “the biggest agency in government, twice the size of the Pentagon, $1.9 trillion dollars,” during an interview with NewsNation. He went on to suggest that the department was doing little to improve the health of Americans, “with all the money that was being thrown at it, with all the personnel that were being brought in.”H.H.S. does spend more than the Department of Defense, which has a discretionary budget of about $850 billion. But according to several budget experts, the overwhelming majority of the H.H.S. department’s $1.8 trillion budget is not spent on its staff.Spending on personnel at the federal health agencies accounts for a small fraction of its budget — less than 1 percent, according to three budget experts. That includes the staff of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and others.The overwhelming majority of the money is spent through Medicare, for the health care of people older than 65, or through Medicaid, for people with low incomes. Those funds filter out to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, dialysis centers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and Medicare Advantage private insurance plans.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.

Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, pressed Dr. Oz on transgender care and abortion, and now says he will vote for the physician’s confirmation to become head of Medicare and Medicaid.Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, said on Monday that he had decided to support the nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead Medicare and Medicaid because Dr. Oz told him that he would no longer support transgender care for minors and was “unequivocally pro-life.”The Senate is expected to vote on Dr. Oz’s nomination to become administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sometime this month.Mr. Hawley was vocal about withholding his support for Dr. Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon who became a daytime TV celebrity, over concerns about his previous positions on transgender care and certain state abortion laws. Dr. Oz featured segments on the television show about transgender care and had also previously raised possible objections to proposed state legislation that would prohibit abortion based on fetal heartbeats.In his responses to Mr. Hawley’s written questions, Dr. Oz assured the senator that he “disavows his previous support for trans surgeries & drugs for minor children,” Mr. Hawley posted on X, the social media site. He added that he “also walks back past criticism of state pro-life laws.” Dr. Oz said he would also “work to end funding for abortion providers,” Mr. Hawley said.Mr. Hawley’s opposition could have jeopardized Dr. Oz’s confirmation, given that Democrats seemed likely to vote against him along party lines. C.M.S. is a $1.5 trillion agency responsible for providing health care coverage to nearly half of Americans.Last month, Mr. Hawley successfully forced the ouster of a lawyer at the Food and Drug Administration over her support for the availability of the abortion pill under President Biden.A spokesman for Dr. Oz did not return a request for comment.

10 hours ago

The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.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.

Hundreds of federal health workers, including doctors in senior leadership positions, began hearing early Tuesday morning that they are losing their jobs, part of a vast restructuring that will winnow down the agencies charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he is shrinking his department by 10,000 employees. Some senior leaders based in the Washington, D.C., area received notices that they were being reassigned to Indian Health Service territories, a tactic to force people out, employees said, because it would entail moving to other parts of the country.Combined with previous departures, the layoffs will reduce the department from 82,000 to 62,000 employees. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Notices began arriving at 5 a.m., workers said, affecting offices responsible for everything from global health to medical devices to communications. Some knew the layoffs were coming; at the department headquarters in Washington, officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told Friday that their offices were being eliminated, according to employees.Others were caught off guard. At the Food and Drug Administration, senior leaders were pushed out and offices focused on food, drug and medical device policy were hit with deep staff reductions amounting to about 3,500 agency staff members. Some workers said that they discovered they were fired when they attempted to scan their badge to get into the building early Tuesday.The top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was offered a job with a regional office of the Indian Health Service that includes Alaska, according to Mitch Zeller, his predecessor at the division. Other staff who oversee veterinary medicine and coordinate the complex work of reviewing new drug applications that can run for thousands of pages were let go.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.

32 minutes ago

Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses.He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped.“Yum,” Mr. Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.”Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent Covid-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers.Mr. Grinsteiner, 54, is a Trump supporter and country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Grinsteiner said that he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being.There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Mr. Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. 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.