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At the UCSF Emergency Department, where I work, we’re starting to notice a dangerous trend: insurers refusing to pay for emergency care after the fact based on whether a patient’s final diagnosis appears “serious enough.” For emergency physicians like me, this is a familiar and troubling pattern. Years ago, insurers attempted to deny coverage for visits deemed “non-emergent” based on discharge diagnoses. But emergency care doesn’t work that way. Patients don’t arrive with diagnoses — they arrive with symptoms, often indistinguishable from life-threatening conditions. (Maria Raven, 6/14)

More than 70 million Americans rely on Social Security and Medicare benefits in retirement. However, many are probably unaware that both programs’ trust funds are headed to zero — at which point, the law states that big cuts will happen automatically. Yet very few of our political leaders are saying much about this massive issue. (Maya MacGuineas, 6/15)

The Trump administration has taken important steps to strengthen America’s national health security by preserving the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, known as ASPR, within the Department of Health and Human Services and recently nominating a new assistant secretary to guide the agency. Congress should now build on that momentum by swiftly confirming the administration’s nominee and reauthorizing the law that provides ASPR’s authorities, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act. (W. Craig Vanderwagen and Jennifer B. Alton, 6/16)

Republican attorneys general from 14 states — led by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway — sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month demanding action on what they warn is “a growing threat to the country’s waterways.” So what gives? Has America’s staunchly pro-industrial party suddenly become a bunch of tree huggers? No. The attorneys general's EPA gambit is an all-too-obvious head-fake in service to a more familiar goal: denying reproductive rights to women. (6/15)

When I wrote for The Star last December, I was in the middle of the fight of my professional life. The Kansas State Board of Nursing decided that giving speeches about dementia while my license briefly lapsed as I cared for my husband through cancer treatment constituted “unprofessional conduct.” Its members wanted me to admit guilt and accept a permanent mark in three national nursing databases that would have made me essentially unemployable. I refused. (Amy Rose Siple, 6/15)

Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as something that happens in old age. My family learned otherwise. When my mother began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in her late 50s, our family entered a world of uncertainty. At an age when most people are still working, making plans for retirement, and looking forward to the future, my mother was facing a disease that would ultimately take her life at just 65 years old. (Erin Mahoney, 6/15)