Health

The Guardian -   In 2024, people in the United States owed at least $220bn in medical debt, according to KFF, a nonprofit health research group. About 14 million owed more than $1,000, and 3 million people owed more than $10,000.

“Costs are very high, and some people have no health insurance, so when they get sick or injured or need healthcare, they have no way to pay the extremely high charges,” said Emma Wager, KFF senior police analyst.

Even people with insurance often have high deductibles or high cost-sharing provisions in their plans, which means they could still find the bills unaffordable, Wager said.

Patients often fall behind in their payments. In 2024, 21% of US households had a past-due medical bill, according to the journal Health Affairs Scholar. In 2021, more than half of the bills sent to collectors were for medical care, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Washington Post -   When Sen. Chris Murphy, 53, was hospitalized after a stroke Saturday, he became a high-profile example of what may be a troubling trend: Strokes seem to be more common in younger adults than they were in the past.

Over almost three decades, a team of researchers has been tracking cases in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. This area is not random — it’s demographically similar to the United States overall in terms of age, race, education and income, said Emily Fisher, a neurologist at the University of Cincinnati and one of the researchers. “That allows us, if we see a signal in our region, to say, ‘Hey, does this need to be looked at on a greater scale because it could be reflective of what’s going on in the United States overall?’”

The results of this effort, published in September in Neurology, showed that stroke rates among 20- to 54-year-olds in the region almost doubled from 1993-94 to 2020, while declining among older people. The increase was largely driven by the ischemic type, caused by a blockage in a blood vessel — often a clot — supplying the brain.

Still, strokes remain much less common in younger adults. Their annual rate rose from about 34 to 62 cases per 100,000 people. In the older group (those 55 and older), it fell from about 619 to 453.