People will get more time to sign up for “Obamacare” health insurance, the Trump administration announced Monday, following a spate of computer glitches over the weekend. The new HealthCare.gov deadline is 3 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a statement. Coverage takes effect Jan. 1.

Kim Motl doesn’t work in the health insurance industry. But her friends and neighbors do. So when she saw Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Motl pressed the Democratic presidential candidate about her “Medicare for All” plan, which would replace private insurance with a government-run system. “What about the little guys that work in the insurance business,...

Sharpening their 2020 election message, House Democrats on Thursday pushed through legislation that would empower Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and offer new benefits for seniors. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill would cap Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs for medicines at $2,000 a year. It would use about $360 billion of its projected 10-year savings from lower drug costs to establish...

The House will hold a showdown vote next week on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices, expanded Thursday to provide seniors with dental, vision and hearing benefits not currently covered. Leading Democratic committee chairmen said the Congressional Budget Office has indicated that Pelosi’s bill would save the government $500 billion over 10 years, which they pledged…

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders discusses the dangerous realities of climate change, his comprehensive proposal to take on the fossil fuel industry to protect our planet and why his Medicare expansion plan makes sense.

Democratic presidential candidates clashed Wednesday in a debate over the future of health care in America, racial inequality and their ability to build a winning coalition to take on President Donald Trump next year. The faceoff came after hours of testimony in the impeachment inquiry of Trump and at a critical juncture in the Democratic race to run against him...

New safety standards aimed at preventing suicides have led to overhauls inside psychiatric hospitals and emergency departments around the country, with facilities now issuing patients paper gowns, stripping artwork from walls and removing bathroom doors.

Elizabeth Warren pushed back against critics of her newly released plan to phase in implementation of a single-payer health care system, insisting Saturday that she is “fully committed” to “Medicare for All” and that she plans to first build on existing health care programs because “people need help right now.” “My commitment to Medicare for All is all the way,”...

Elizabeth Warren announced Friday that she won’t immediately push to give every American government-funded health care and instead will work to oversee passage of a sweeping “Medicare for All” program by the end of her third year if elected president — a significant step away from a plan she’s long championed.

Warren has risen in the polls for months, among the front-runners now in the 2020 Democratic primary and finding herself portrayed by comedian Kate McKinnon on “Saturday Night Live.” For many people, however, Warren is still a relative unknown, even among those who have begun paying closer attention with voting beginning in under three months.

Elizabeth Warren on Friday proposed $20 trillion in federal spending over the next decade to provide health care to every American without raising taxes on the middle class, a politically risky effort that pits the goal of universal coverage against skepticism of government-run health care. Read More

The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged to $984.4 billion, its highest point in seven years, and is widely expected to top the $1 trillion mark in coming years. The 26% surge from the 2018 deficit of $779 billion that the government reported Friday reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a...

One family experienced first-hand a problem that doctors say is too common and worsening: shortages of childhood cancer drugs. Doctors, meanwhile, find themselves having to ration life-saving drugs.

Consumers will have more health insurance choices next year under the much-debated Obama health care law and premiums will dip slightly for many, the Trump administration announced Tuesday. President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to repeal “Obamacare.” But despite his repeated efforts the program has stabilized three years into his administration. That may be short-lived. The administration is...

One man’s case illustrates troubling uncertainty in a transplant system run by government contractors that are under fire for letting potentially usable organs go to waste. The Associated Press took a close look at that system and calculated that some of those agencies are securing deceased donors at half the rate of others — even as 113,000 people linger on...

It wasn’t too long ago that Donald Trump derided presidential executive orders as “power grabs” and a “basic disaster.” He’s switched sides in a big way: In each year of his presidency, he has issued more executive orders than did former President Barack Obama during the same time span. He surpassed Obama’s third-year total just recently. Back in 2012, Trump...

Millions of retirees will get a modest 1.6% cost-of-living increase from Social Security in 2020, an uptick with potential political consequences in an election year when Democrats are pushing more generous inflation protection. The increase amounts to $24 a month for the average retired worker, according to estimates released Thursday by the Social Security Administration. Following a significant boost this...

Major legislation to reduce prescription drug costs for millions of people may get sidelined now that House Democrats have begun an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Proposals had been moving in Congress, but there are more ways for the process to break down than to succeed. Still, nobody says they’re giving up.

Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Va. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they say, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April. Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued...

Conservative Republican Dan Bishop won a special election for an open House seat in North Carolina, averting a demoralizing Democratic capture of a district the GOP has held for nearly six decades. But his narrow victory didn’t erase questions about whether President Donald Trump and his party’s congressional candidates face troubling headwinds approaching 2020. Bishop, a state senator best known...