Health Care

As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 census, news outlets nationwide will be working to help the public understand the importance and impact of the once-every-10-years population count.

To help journalists bolster their coverage, we reached out to two experts — a research professor at George Washington University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau — to ask them to point out weaknesses in and ways newsrooms can improve their census coverage. They offered great feedback.

Obtaining mental health care can be difficult even for people who are covered by health insurance. Patients regularly deal with hurdles such as incorrect phone numbers for providers’ offices, insurers’ prior authorization requirements, month-long delays in scheduling appointments and psychiatrists who refuse to accept insurance at all, according to a series of studies by J. Wesley Boyd and colleagues at the Cambridge Health Alliance.

Two new studies demonstrate a link between Medicaid expansion and positive health outcomes, adding quantitative evidence to inform the nation’s ongoing debate about health insurance coverage.

This tip sheet, originally published in 2018, has been updated to include more recent statistics and additional information.

Sex education has been a controversial subject for decades as public school officials and parents have debated the best ways to help teenagers avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Not all states require schools to teach sex ed. But many states require sex education instructors to discuss or stress abstinence from sexual activity, with some schools offering abstinence-only programming, which urges kids to wait until marriage and often excludes information about contraceptives.

About one-quarter of adults living in rural parts of the U.S. were not able to get health care when they needed it during the past few years, despite having health insurance, according to new findings from a national survey made public on Tuesday.