Health

At last count, 28.2 million Americans don’t have health insurance. That staggering number doesn’t include people who technically have insurance but are too cash-strapped to pay their deductibles, out-of-network charges, and copays. Thanks to the United States’ inefficient and ultra-expensive health-care system, that means public hospitals are often on the hook when patients can’t pay or insurance companies refuse to cover medical bills.

Though heroin-related deaths in Miami-Dade reached an all-time high in 2016 and South Florida continued to lead the nation in new HIV diagnoses, there’s some good news: Opioid deaths are decreasing, according to a study from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. One possible reason is the University of Miami’s syringe…

Two hours after North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot behavioral technician Charles Kinsey — an unarmed black man — Det. Michael Gaudio interviewed Kinsey’s client with severe autism, 26-year-old Arnaldo Rios Soto.

Being a baby isn’t all nap time and cuteness. There’s the whole diaper thing and the limited menu, plus strangers constantly getting in your face. It can be rough.

Florida voters legalized medical marijuana in 2016. But that referendum directed the Florida Legislature — a group dominated by fear-mongering, fun-hating conservatives — to write most of the rules and regulations for medical pot. After a gigantic political battle, the Legislature in 2017 finalized a list of ways that patients could legally ingest medicinal pot…

Remember when Florida activist Cara Jennings confronted Florida governor and Arctic-dwelling trickster demon Rick Scott inside a Starbucks, called him “an asshole” to his face, and asked how he could live with himself after he refused to expand Medicaid in Florida and give more people health care?

Because Florida is run by former hospital executive Rick Scott, you might assume the state would have a solid health-care system. But Scott is a profiteer whose company stole an unprecedented amount of money from Medicare and Medicaid in the ’90s and who as governor then refused to expand Medicaid…

The reviews of GAINSWave, a procedure in which men get their nether regions blasted with sound waves for better erections, are actually glowing. A Men’s Health reporter who has also tried gas-station sexual enhancement pills and something called “red light therapy” — all in the name of journalism — wrote about sprouting a boner during dinner with his grandmother after giving the sonic treatment a go last spring.

A Cat 5 PR shitstorm hit Miami’s Tri-Source Pharma late last year after the Wall Street Journal published a story showing the company had raised the price of a cancer drug more than 1,400 percent. Some internet commenters were quick to compare Tri-Source CEO Robert DiCrisci to Martin Shkreli, the now-convicted “pharma bro” who in 2015 jacked up the price of Daraprim, a drug used by HIV patients. One particularly angry Twitter user went as far as to call DiCrisci “the human equivalent of a loaded cat litter box.”

These days, the U.S. Army predominantly recruits from Southern states. According to 2013 enlistment data, Georgia and Florida have two of the nation’s highest per-capita rates of locals joining the Army. However, a study released earlier this month by researchers at the Citadel, one of the military’s major universities, issues a warning.

Late yesterday afternoon, a Tallahassee judge permanently blocked Florida from forcing women seeking abortions to undergo a useless, 24-hour waiting period before ending their pregnancies. That move seemed to deal a blow to one of the most significant women’s rights proposals passed by the frighteningly conservative Florida Legislature in recent years.

Robert DiCrisci, CEO of the Miami-based pharmaceutical startup NextSource Biotechnology, was roundly criticized all over the world last week after the Wall Street Journal reported that NextSource had bought a 40-year-old brain-cancer drug and raised its maximum price to $768 per pill.

For nearly 40 years, a maximum dose of lomustine, a cancer drug that treats brain tumors, cost no more than $50. But after Miami-based startup NextSource bought the rights to the drug from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2013, the Wall Street Journal says, the drug’s price spiked to $768 per pill…

The GOP tax bill passed today! And it repeals the “individual mandate” written into the Affordable Care Act, AKA the Obamacare provision that mandated that all people buy health insurance. Though Obamacare was far from a perfect program, the mandate repeal that’s sneakily included in the draconian, monstrous “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” today is expected to destabilize all sorts of insurance markets and ultimately force millions of people off of their health plans.

Last month, Gov. Rick Scott proposed a three-day limit on opioid prescriptions as part of his upcoming legislation and $50 million investment to combat the opioid crisis in Florida. Though the details of Scott’s bill are still unclear, some physicians and patients such as Paulson say the limitation is too broad and could make it all but impossible to treat chronic pain and terminal illnesses.

So many terrible ideas come out of Tallahassee every year that it’s often hard to guess whether a random law was enacted in Florida or Saudi Arabia. Case in point: One of those two states passed a law in March 2016 forcing anyone giving “advice” about abortion — from a…

There are 21 million people in Florida. Sen. Marco Rubio is almost certainly about to vote for an Obamacare repeal bill that, according to a study released yesterday, would likely cut health coverage from 3.2 million of them. That’s roughly 15 percent of the state.

While tens of thousands of Floridians were without electricity or internet this week, Senate Republicans were busy devising new and ingenious ways to strip health care from millions of people. Now that most Floridians have cell-phone service again, they should spend the week calling Sen. Marco Rubio…

South Florida has the highest HIV rate in America thanks in part to intravenous drug use. But the head of the Miami’s police union, Javier Ortiz, has now repeatedly called for the city to kill a program designed to slow the rate of AIDS infections and save the lives of IV drug addicts.