Having health insurance used to mean that if you got sick, you’d get all the medical care you needed. Not any more.
A new survey from the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change found significant increases in the number of…

He didn’t come to St. Louis to walk the fault line in modern medicine. But that’s essentially what happened when Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, visited with cardiac patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital last week.
Cardiac care units like…

Metropolis, Ill., is offering its employees $1,000 if they quit smoking for one year, according to this AP account.

The move is sound economically for the city. Non-smoking employees typically miss fewer days because of illness. Smokers, meanwhile, cost employers…

The St. Louis-based Missouri Foundation For Health gives away about $60 million a year to nonprofit groups that provide medical care to the poor and uninsured. The foundation has paid for kids’ dental care; provided the cervical cancer vaccine to…

In the general election of 2000, the full impact of the term limits Missouri voters had imposed on their state Legislature eight years earlier kicked in. Ninety of the 163 members of the Missouri House elected in 2000 were freshmen.…

Sheltered care homes like the one Madison County has been operating for decades are relics of an earlier time. That doesn’t mean that some people with mental disabilities don’t need the service they provide, but it does mean that the…

I am only in my third week at the Post-Dispatch, having returned to town fulltime on April 20 after a more than six year absence.

I have been back at least once a year to visit family, but this really…

Nonprofit hospitals are increasingly demanding payment in advance for complex and expensive cancer treatments and other non-emergency care for life-threatening illness, the Wall Street Journal reports this week.

It highlights the story of 52-year-old Lisa Kelly of Lake Jackson, TX., who was…

Elizabeth Edwards is the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but she’s best known for being a patient. Shortly after her husband and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost the 2004 presidential election, Mrs. Edwards revealed that she had…

We’ve heard a lot lately about growing income disparities in the U.S. The rich are getting richer while the rest of us tread water. But the difference goes beyond bank statements, to average life expectancy.

A new study shows that…