KidsCare II is here, offering health care coverage to 22,000 of the more than 100,000 children waitlisted since Arizona’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) enrollment was frozen in 2010. One simple thing could keep an eligible child from coverage: a lack of up-to-date contact information. Since that’s no reason for a child to go without, [...]

Reality TV seems to be good at publicizing its own version of what might be called vulnerable adults, but hardly anyone talks about the more shocking circumstances faced by the actual vulnerable adult population. Elders and adults with disabilities face more incidents of unethical care than any of us would like to believe. In North [...]

Sex and Politics are often a pernicious pair. In most instances – especially the scandalous ones – someone loses their head and ends up sorry about what happens down the road, which may be the case with recently passed state legislation. Seen one way, laws headed onto Arizona’s books (1) relieve employers from the constriction [...]

Food fights just aren’t what they used to be. In the first of what promises to be a series of skirmishes, a journalist, an advocate and researchers are combatants over whether food deserts matter to health or not. Somewhere between the New York Times’ publication of “Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity” [...]

Last month we earned some reader scorn by jumping from new studies on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to the implication that folks consider exercising for heart health rather than using the medication at all. One physician expressed that we had descended to the level of “junk science.” Fair enough. Let’s try to do a better job [...]

Warning: everybody’s got a list of warning signs. They range from topical and fear-inducing to timeless and informative, but they seemingly occupy every shadowy corner of our continuously-connected consciousness. It’s a lot to take. All these warnings are truly cutting into the process of daily living and acting from a place of confidence. Warning: the [...]

The next time you’re watching the dollars fly out of your wallet as you fill your tank at the gas pump, consider another one of overweight and obesity’s hidden costs. Heavier cars use more fuel, no matter how they get that way. Extra pounds traveling down the road impact fuel efficiency, including the additional weight [...]

An L.A. Times reporter put tongue-firmly-in-check with this question, and in so doing painted a vivid picture to mark an unfortunate milestone. According to the Milliman Medical Index, health care costs for a family of four now average $20,728 nationally, roughly the equivalent of buying a mid-size sedan. The catch being that the people tend [...]

Back when death panels were a regular part of the news cycle, the image was conjured of faceless committees that impersonally and unemotionally determined individuals’ fates. ‘Death Panel’ Discussions in a Primary Care Setting, the latest webinar offered in the Arizona Bioethics Network’s EthicsTalk series, promises a more realistic take on April 26 at 7:30am. [...]

Arizona’s ongoing physician shortage is at its heart a classic supply and demand problem. Demand is a moving target, dramatically altered by state budget cuts and slated for a significant shift when additional provisions of the Affordable Care Act take effect in 2014. The supply side, meanwhile, isn’t prepared or resourced to respond effectively. Whatever [...]