It all stems from a positive thing, really. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more people have health insurance. A lot more. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, the state’s largest provider of health and accident insurance, picked up 700,000 subscribers during the ACA’s first enrollment period. In the months…
Planned Parenthood plans to open a new clinic in southern Dallas that will meet the stringent requirements imposed on abortion providers by the state of Texas, ensuring that Dallas has at least one clinic that can perform abortions under the new rules. The regulations, which were passed in the Wendy…
Future Texas Governor Greg Abbott hates nothing more than he hates abortions, Planned Parenthood and other women’s-health-related things, leading the Texas Democratic Party to describe him as “public enemy number one for women in Texas.” But now, in a major national fight pitting women’s health advocates against a corporate giant,…
For Ofa and Rex Clark of Allen, the typical newbie parent worries were multiplied by five on June 17 with the birth of their three daughters and two sons: The third set to arrive at Parkland Hospital in the hospital’s history. The babies — Vianca, Alessandra, Perrin, Noah and Scarlett…
Dallas County Health Director Zachary Thompson gathered the media on Monday to address reports, from Unfair Park and others, that there was a federal investigation into the department’s use of funding designed to treat people with HIV. To be clear, Dallas County Health Department Director Zach Thompson declared, there is…
Alex Smith is the executive director of the North Texas Behavioral Health Authority, the agency that oversees the North Texas public mental health care system. He’s made his living deciphering the ins and outs of the very messy system here, and is well versed in what it takes to properly…
Related: It Really Sucks to Be Old in Texas Texas’ notoriously porous mental-health system is in the news even more than usual this week. At Parkland, the psychiatric ER is yet again facing allegations of patient abuse. Last weekend, Dallas Police shot and killed Jason Harrison, a 38-year-old severely schizophrenic…
In a national report released yesterday by the AARP, findings rank each state in terms of long term care for the elderly. The report considers such factors as nursing home affordability and accessibility, family support, and quality of life and care. The upshot? It sucks to get old in Texas…
Dr. Austin King runs a private practice out of Abilene, and he’s been seeing veteran patients for years. Recently, one veteran came into the office with a neck cyst. After ordering a biopsy for the man, who is in his 80s, King, who’s president of the Texas Medical Association, ordered…
The two Dallas abortion clinics that nearly saw their doors close under the state’s new regulations are remaining open thanks to a settlement with the local hospital that had tried to revoke their admitting privileges. But allegations made by the clinics suggest that it was an aggressive response from anti-abortion…
Johnson & Johnson is known as the family company. Except for when it sells defective medical implants that destroy patients’ genitals.As I reported in last week’s feature story, over 17,000 women, including some in Dallas, are suing Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Ethicon, for its transvaginal mesh products. The…
Synthetic marijuana — K2 and its chemical analogues — is the scary-new-drug du jour in Dallas, having sent somewhere close to 100 users to local emergency rooms in the past week. Even scarier: This represents a spike of only 50 percent. Baylor alone treats 70 fake-weed overdoses per month. Parkland…
Update: Associate District Judge Sheryl McFarlin ordered UGH to temporarily reinstate the doctors’ admitting privileges pending an April 30 hearing. Last month, an appeals court upheld a key provision of Texas’ new anti-abortion law requiring doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. A women’s health…
On Wednesday, the federal government released a massive trove of Medicare data showing how much some 880,000-plus U.S. healthcare providers were paid for their services in 2012. Fully mining the data will take months or years, but using the data to compile a list of the top Medicare billers took…
A significant chunk of America’s uninsured population lives in Texas, and a lot of those people live in the Dallas area. That’s partly because Texas refused to expand Medicaid, which has left a million-plus people too rich to qualify for government insurance but too poor to get subsidies to buy…
Last year, Governor Rick Perry called the Texas Legislature to Austin for two special sessions, both focused on passing one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws. The new law, HB 2, put Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis on the map after an 11-hour filibuster. It also began to unravel…
Electronic cigarettes look like cigarettes. They supply nicotine like cigarettes. Users exhale a puffy cloud like cigarettes. So they must be cigarettes, right? According to the Frisco City Council, yes. On Tuesday night, its members voted unanimously to ban the use of e-cigarettes wherever traditional cigarettes are banned — i.e…
Local officials had a big celebration last month when a hospital in southern Dallas finally started offering forensic exams for rape victims. “Unfortunately, Dallas has a perceived — and maybe a real — impression that individuals from the southern sector don’t receive services like those in the north,” Dallas County…
The folly of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has been well-documented. Billions in federal funds are off the table. More than a million poor adults won’t have access to health coverage. Texas businesses will wind up paying an estimated $400 million in tax…
KERA’s hour-long debate between the four Republican lieutenant-governor hopefuls was, as expected, a desperate scramble to the right. On issue after issue — evolution, abortion, immigration — the candidates studiously avoided any hint of moderation. Nowhere was that clearer than in their answers to the first question of the day:…
Update: On Sunday, Marlise Munoz was allowed to die. According to attorneys for her family, Fort Worth’s JPS Hospital removed Munoz, 23 weeks pregnant, from life support at about 11:30 a.m. Her body was released to her husband, Erick Munoz. The hospital had announced earlier in the day that it…
Mark Crutcher, the founder of Denton’s Life Dynamics, is famous for using clever (i.e. underhanded) strategies in his fight to end abortion. But his new venture, which debuted this weekend at Dallas’ March for Life, is quite direct. Dubbed Bikers for Life, the organization aims to use motorcycles to keep…
