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Since June 19, when new cases in the United States went back over 30,000 in one day, we have been constantly bombarded with stories of how the virus is “spiking” in “record” numbers in many of the states (like California, Texas, Florida and Arizona) that were not hit hard in the “first wave.” Across the country, our number of new cases has indeed exploded to new levels during this time period ... and the news media, both at the national and local levels, have used these statistics to essentially create panic porn. The resulting public anxiety has caused several states to reverse their reopenings. Obviously the “new case” data point is both real and relevant, but it is also now extremely misleading. By incompetently using the same measure of what a “positive” virus test meant in April, to what it now means in July, the news media is in the process of, quite effectively, sabotaging America’s recovery from this crisis. The data ... now makes it overwhelmingly obvious that nowhere near as many people who recently tested positive for the virus are going to die as did when this nightmare began. While the development has gotten scandalously little news coverage, the daily numbers of deaths with/of COVID has been declining with remarkable consistency for well over two months now. Sweden, a country much maligned in the media because they dared to not lock down by government mandate, has “new case” and “death” charts which look remarkably similar to ours. Their daily death rate has recently been down to single digits.

Note: Don't miss this entire article which pulls back the curtain on media manipulations in these challenging times. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and media manipulation from reliable major media sources.

A model predicting the progression of the novel coronavirus pandemic produced by researchers at Imperial College London set off alarms across the world and was a major factor in several governments' decisions to lock things down. But a new model from Oxford University is challenging its accuracy. The Oxford research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide. In the United Kingdom, which the study focuses on, half the population would have already been infected. If accurate, that would mean transmission began around mid-January and the vast majority of cases presented mild or no symptoms. The head of the study, professor Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford theoretical epidemiologist, said she still supports the U.K.'s decision to shut down the country to suppress the virus. But she also doesn't appear to be a big fan of the work done by the Imperial College team. If her work is accurate, that would likely mean a large swath of the population has built up resistance to the virus. Theoretically, then, social restrictions could ease sooner than anticipated. What needs to be done now, Gupta said, is a whole lot of antibody testing to figure out who may have contracted the virus. Her research team is working with groups from the University of Cambridge and the University of Kent to start those tests for the general population as quickly as possible.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus pandemic from reliable major media sources.

A man from London has become the second person in the world to be cured of HIV, doctors say. Adam Castillejo is still free of the virus more than 30 months after stopping anti-retroviral therapy. He was not cured by the HIV drugs, however, but by a stem-cell treatment he received for a cancer he also had, the Lancet HIV journal reports. The donors of those stem cells have an uncommon gene that gives them, and now Mr Castillejo, protection against HIV. In 2011, Timothy Brown, the "Berlin Patient" became the first person reported as cured of HIV, three and half years after having similar treatment. Stem-cell transplants appear to stop the virus being able to replicate inside the body by replacing the patient's own immune cells with donor ones that resist HIV infection. Adam Castillejo - the now 40-year-old "London Patient" who has decided to go public with his identity - has no detectable active HIV infection in his blood, semen or tissues, his doctors say. It is now a year after they first announced he was clear of the virus and he still remains free of HIV. Lead researcher Prof Ravindra Kumar Gupta, from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News: "This represents HIV cure with almost certainty. "We have now had two and a half years with anti-retroviral-free remission. "Our findings show that the success of stem-cell transplantation as a cure for HIV, first reported nine years ago in the Berlin Patient, can be replicated."

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Vice-premier Sun Chunlan, one of the most senior government officials to visit the centre of the coronavirus outbreak [was] heckled by residents who yelled “fake, fake, everything is fake” as she inspected the work of a neighbourhood committee charged with taking care of quarantined residents. Videos posted online showed Sun and a delegation walking along the grounds while residents appeared to shout from their apartment windows, “fake, fake,” “it’s all fake,” as well as “we protest”. Since 12 February, all residential compounds in Wuhan have been put under lockdown, barring most residents from leaving their homes. In an unusual turn of events, on Friday various Chinese state media outlets reported the videos showing public discontent. Such videos are frequently censored. Yet, the People’s Daily posted a video subtitled in English showing one person shouting “fake, fake,” which has since been removed. A government-affiliated account on WeChat ... said in an essay posted on Thursday that all the facts of the incident were “basically true”. According to state broadcaster CCTV, Sun held a meeting immediately after the incident to deal with the complaints. Staff have been dispatched to visit the residents one by one. Observers say state media may be trying to co-opt discussion of the videos, which circulated widely online, and provide their own narrative of events. Elsewhere in China, schools in provinces reporting no new cases for a number of days, started to set their opening dates in a sign of the country returning to normal. Wuhan reported 126 new coronavirus cases on Thursday but the wider province of Hubei excluding the capital recorded none for the first time during the outbreak.

Note: Remember all of the privacy and freedoms given up after 9/11? How many of those have been given back? Learn more about the serious risk of the Coronavirus increasing the surveillance state in this excellent article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

In a direct challenge to California regulators and Bay Area environmentalists, the Trump administration Thursday ordered companies to ignore state requirements that businesses warn customers if their products contain glyphosate, a weed killer that has been linked to cancer. The decision flies in the face of three California court rulings against Monsanto, which markets the chemical as Roundup. The agricultural giant faces more than 13,000 suits nationwide by users of Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would no longer approve labels saying glyphosate is known to cause cancer. The state requires companies to warn customers about chemicals known to cause cancer under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Glyphosate was classified as a probable human carcinogen in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization. Lawyers for sick clients who were awarded tens of millions of dollars after suing Monsanto introduced evidence that glyphosate can cause genetic damage that leads to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They claimed Monsanto ignored that information and published information “ghost written” by staffers denying the toxicity of the chemical. Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith said there was clear evidence that Monsanto, after learning of the dangers, “made efforts to impede, discourage or distort scientific inquiry” by regulators.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

In May 2008, as the opioid epidemic was raging in America, a representative of the nation’s largest manufacturer of opioid pain pills sent an email to a client at a wholesale drug distributor in Ohio. Victor Borelli, a national account manager for Mallinckrodt, told Steve Cochrane, the vice president of sales for KeySource Medical, to check his inventories and “[i]f you are low, order more. If you are okay, order a little more, Capesce?” Then Borelli joked, “destroy this email ... Is that really possible? Oh Well...” Those email excerpts are quoted in a 144-page plaintiffs’ filing along with thousands of pages of documents unsealed by a judge’s order Friday in a landmark case in Cleveland against many of the largest companies in the drug industry. A Drug Enforcement Administration database released earlier in the week revealed that the companies had inundated the nation with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills from 2006 through 2012. Nearly 2,000 cities, counties and towns are alleging that the companies knowingly flooded their communities with opioids, fueling an epidemic that has killed more than 200,000. The filing by plaintiffs depict some drug company employees as driven by profits and undeterred by the knowledge that their products were wreaking havoc across the country. Plaintiffs in the case argue that the actions of some of America’s biggest and best-known companies - including Mallinckrodt, Cardinal Health, McKesson, Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and Purdue Pharma - amounted to a civil racketeering enterprise.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on pharmaceutical industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons. This is not merely a technical error. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points. Several states - including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont - are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice. These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On a national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to the coronavirus into question. The number of tests conducted nationwide each day has more than doubled in the past month. At the same time, the portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Former patients of a retired Indianapolis fertility doctor expressed anger that he avoided jail time Thursday for lying about using his own sperm to impregnate as many as dozens of women after telling them the donors were anonymous. Dr. Donald Cline was given a one-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice. No other charges were filed ... because Indiana law doesn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. The charges stemmed from two confirmed cases of paternity. Matt White and his mother, Liz White, said Cline deserved far greater punishment. He said DNA tests showed that Cline was his biological father even though Cline told his mother decades ago that he used anonymous sperm donations. "There's dozens of us," said Matt White. Some of the now-adult children of Cline's former patients filed a complaint with the Indiana Attorney General's Office in 2014, after they became suspicious while scouring online records to find biological relatives. Paternity tests performed the Marion County prosecutor's office determined Cline was likely the biological father of at least two of his patients' children. Cline, who retired in 2009, initially denied the allegations when he wrote to investigators, saying the women who filed the complaints were trying to slander him. On Thursday, he acknowledged that he had lied. Matt White said private DNA tests have identified 23 people as Cline's biological children with mothers who were his patients.

Note: See a list of powerful articles revealing egregious and rampant sexual abuse by doctors around the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals and health.

Researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling. The memory transmission extended out another generation when these male mice bred. Neuroscientists at Emory University found that genetic markers, thought to be wiped clean before birth, were used to transmit a single traumatic experience across generations, leaving behind traces in the behavior and anatomy of future pups. The study, published ... in the journal Nature Neuroscience, adds to a growing pile of evidence suggesting that characteristics outside of the strict genetic code may also be acquired from our parents through epigenetic inheritance. Epigenetics studies how molecules act as DNA markers that influence how the genome is read. We pick up these epigenetic markers during our lives and in various locations on our body as we develop and interact with our environment. The researchers also artificially inseminated females using the sperm from the original fear-conditioned mice. The results were the same, suggesting epigenetic inheritance rather than environment.

Note: The emerging field of epigenetics implies that lifestyle and environment influence the expression of DNA. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.

November 30 marks the International Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides over southern Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Nearly two-thirds was Agent Orange, later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) – a potent, long-lasting dioxin. TCDD is a known human carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor, linked to cancers, reproductive disorders, and birth defects that can span generations. By the letter of the CWC, Agent Orange is not classified as a "chemical weapon." If you ask a Vietnam veteran suffering from Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, or any of the 19 types of conditions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) associates with Agent Orange exposure, you'll hear a very different story. To them, it was every bit a weapon designed to destroy life and health. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that over 757,000 veterans – about one in four who served – were receiving benefits linked to Agent Orange. The 2022 PACT Act broadened that circle to veterans who served in other areas where Agent Orange was used. By 2024, more than 84,000 new Vietnam-era veterans were granted compensation, many due to exposure. Fifty years after the Vietnam War ended, the toxic legacy of Agent Orange and other dioxins lingers on.

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Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain – "basilar ganglia" – that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI – but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

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Before becoming secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a swashbuckling environmental attorney who regularly took aim at the meat industry. For over a decade, a group of food safety, environmental, and animal welfare nonprofits has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration – which Kennedy now oversees – to ban the use of ... ractopamine hydrochloride. Fed to pigs in the final weeks of their lives, ractopamine speeds up muscle gain so that pork producers can squeeze more profit from each animal. But the drug has been linked to severe adverse events in pigs, including trembling, reluctance to move, collapse, inability to stand up, hoof disorders, difficulty breathing, and even death. Earlier this year, the FDA denied the petition to ban the drug. While 26 countries have approved ractopamine use in livestock, more than 165 have banned or restricted it, and many have set restrictions on or have altogether prohibited the import of pork and beef from ractopamine-fed animals. The bans stem primarily from concerns that the trace amounts of the drug found in meat could harm consumers, especially those with cardiovascular conditions. Given the lack of trials, ractopamine's threat to human health is unclear. But there's a clear case to be made that ractopamine ought to be banned because of its awful effects on animals.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on factory farming and food system corruption.

More than 90% of samples of a dozen fruits and vegetables tested positive for potentially harmful pesticide residues, according to the 2025 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Dubbed the "Dirty Dozen," the list is compiled from the latest government testing data on nonorganic produce by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a health advocacy organization that has produced the annual report since 2004. Spinach topped the list, with more pesticide residue by weight than any other produce tested, followed by strawberries, kale (along with mustard greens and collards), grapes, peaches, cherries, nectarines, pears, apples, blackberries, blueberries and potatoes. The annual report is [meant] to provide tools for decisions on whether to buy organic for the fruits or vegetables their families consume the most, said Alexis Temkin, EWG's vice president of science. "One of the things that a lot of peer-reviewed studies have shown over and over again (is) that when people switch to an organic diet from a conventional diet, you can really see measurable levels in the reduction of pesticide levels in the urine." EWG also creates an annual "Clean Fifteen" – a list of conventional produce with the least amount of pesticide residue. Pineapple was the least contaminated produce tested, followed by sweet corn (fresh and frozen), avocados, papaya, onions, frozen sweet peas, asparagus, cabbage, watermelon, cauliflower, bananas, mangos, carrots, mushrooms and kiwi.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption and toxic chemicals.

Outro Health [is] a telehealth startup that CEO and cofounder Brandon Goode describes as "Uber for getting off antidepressants." Outro officially launched in the US last month and is currently available in seven states. The startup is betting that many of the growing number of Americans taking antidepressants will eventually want help coming off them. Over 11 percent of US adults took medication for depression in 2023. Research has found the prevalence of adverse withdrawal symptoms may be much higher, particularly among patients who have been on them for long periods. Outro pairs patients with a clinician who meets with them on a custom schedule and guides them through a tailored tapering program. Outro currently employs a small group of medical contractors, including nurse practitioners specializing in psychiatry and general nurse practitioners, who are supervised by psychiatrists. [British academic psychiatrist and co-founder of Outro] Mark Horowitz ... was driven by his own harrowing experience coming off antidepressants ... when he was a psychiatry doctoral student. Severe insomnia and dizziness were so debilitating ...It took me years to come off, not weeks as guidelines recommended." After he recovered, Horowitz began pushing for doctors to adopt new clinical guidelines for getting off antidepressants. He coauthored the Royal College of Psychiatry's guidance for psychiatric drug cessation and joined the UK's National Health Service as a clinical research fellow. "To me, it is actually a very leftist issue to de-medicalize the way we treat anxiety and depression," [Horowitz] says, noting that such illnesses are often caused "by social circumstances, by poverty, by loneliness."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption and mental health.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he plans to tell American medical schools they must offer nutrition courses to students or risk losing federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. Speaking at an event in North Carolina in April, Kennedy lamented, "There's almost no medical schools that have nutrition courses, and so [aspiring physicians] are taught how to treat illnesses with drugs but not how to treat them with food or to keep people healthy so they don't need the drugs." He added, "One of the things that we'll do over the next year is to announce that medical schools that don't have those programs are not going to be eligible for our funding, and that we will withhold funds from those who don't implement those kinds of courses." A study published in the Journal of Biomedical Education in 2015 surveyed 121 American medical schools in 2012-2013 and found that medical students spend, on average, only 19 hours on required nutrition education over their four years. Those numbers have frustrated some nutrition experts, who argue doctors should focus more on preventing diet-driven conditions like obesity and diabetes and less on prescribing drugs. "We have to do something about this," said Dr. David Eisenberg, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "The public imagines that physicians are required to know a lot more than they are trained to know about nutrition," added Eisenberg.

Note: Nutrition funding represents only 4-5% of the total obligations at the NIH. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health.

Ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, herbicides and pesticides, and fluoride: They're all targets of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, whose chief proponent is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Now, MAHA Films, a production company dedicated to promoting the movement's values, has released its first documentary. "Toxic Nation: From Fluoride to Seed Oils – How We Got Here, Who Profits, and What You Can Do." [The film] highlights those four food- and environmental-related issues that Kennedy's nonprofit MAHA Action ... says "silently endanger millions of Americans every day." The documentary's release follows the May 22 publication of the first MAHA Commission report, which lays the groundwork for an overhaul of federal policy to reduce the burden of chronic disease on American children. Composing up to 70% of the US food supply, ultraprocessed foods are made with industrial techniques and ingredients never or rarely used in kitchens, or classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing. Ultraprocessed foods are typically low in fiber; are high in calories, added sugar, refined grains and fats, and sodium; and include additives. The [also] film raises concerns about the herbicide glyphosate, citing previously documented links to cancer. Sources also said glyphosate may cause endocrine disruption and damaged gut microbiomes, with the latter potentially increasing risk for irritable bowel diseases and celiac disease.

Note: Read our latest Substack article on how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporate cartels fueling America's health crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption and toxic chemicals.

Today marks 50 years since the end of the American War in Vietnam, which killed an estimated 3.3 million Vietnamese people, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, tens of thousands of Laotians and more than 58,000 U.S. service members. But for many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people; Vietnamese Americans; and U.S. Vietnam veterans and their descendants, the impacts of the war never ended. They continue to suffer the devastating consequences of Agent Orange, an herbicide mixture used by the U.S. military that contained dioxin, the deadliest chemical known to humankind. As a result, many people have been born with congenital anomalies – disabling changes in the formation of the spinal cord, limbs, heart, palate, and more. This remains the largest deployment of herbicidal warfare in history. In the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration promised to contribute $3 billion for compensation and postwar reconstruction of Vietnam. But that promise remains unfulfilled. Between 2,100,000 and 4,800,000 Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian people, and tens of thousands of Americans were exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin during the spraying operations. Many other Vietnamese people were or continue to be exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin through contact with the environment and food that was contaminated. Many offspring of those who were exposed have congenital anomalies, developmental disabilities, and other diseases.

Note: Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced The Agent Orange Relief Act of 2025 to attempt to provide relief for some of the victims of this toxic chemical. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and toxic chemicals.

The Trump administration plans to take action to remove artificial food dyes from the nation's food supply, according to a media advisory sent by the US Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary will share more about the administration's plans on Tuesday. In January ... the FDA announced that it had banned the use of red dye No. 3 in food, beverages and ingested drugs. The move came more than 30 years after scientists discovered links to cancer in animals. The Trump administration appears poised to take action on a broader set of petroleum-based synthetic dyes that are used to make food and beverages brightly colored. In March, Kennedy joined West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey to support newly signed legislation to ban certain synthetic dyes in food. The state was the first to institute a sweeping ban on synthetic food dyes, which have been tied to issues with learning and behavior in some children and of which Kennedy has been an outspoken critic. Lawmakers in more than half of states – both Republican- and Democrat-led – are pushing to restrict access, according to a tracker by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental health organization, reflecting a bipartisan push toward a safer food system. Red No. 3, red No. 40, blue No. 2 and green No. 3 all have been linked with cancer or tumors in animals.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.

Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders - including restless leg syndrome (RLS) - say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour. Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs - given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move - ruined their lives. A report by drugs firm GSK - seen by the BBC - shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as "deviant" sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson's. Some of the women who described being drawn to risky sexual behaviour told us they had no idea of what was causing it. Others said they felt compelled to gamble or shop with no history of such activities. Impulsive behaviours, including gambling and increased sex drive, have long been listed as side effects in medicine leaflets for dopamine agonist drugs - and are thought to affect between 6% to 17% of RLS patients taking them, according to health guidance body NICE. The cases of what the GSK report from 2003 described as "deviant behaviour" involved two men who were prescribed Ropinirole for Parkinson's disease. In one, a 63-year-old-man sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl, leading to a custodial sentence. In the second case, a 45-year-old man carried out "uncontrolled acts of exhibitionism and indecent behaviour".

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Health care is so expensive that 31 million U.S. adults, or 12%, had to borrow a total of $74 billion last year to obtain medical care, new data shows. That includes people with health insurance, making such numbers even more troubling. Almost one-third of the more than 3,500 people surveyed by Gallup and West Health, a group of nonprofit health care organizations, said they're "very concerned" that a major health event would lead to medical debt despite most of them having some form of health care coverage. To avoid taking on debt, families sometimes make tradeoffs, such as purchasing fewer groceries or not paying rent in order to get the care they need. Nearly one in five adults between the ages of 18 and 28 reported borrowing money to pay for health care, according to the survey. Only 9% of Americans between 50 and 64 and 2% of those 65 or older reported having to borrow money to obtain needed medical care. "There are a lot of disparities in terms of who borrows," [Tim Lash, president of West Health] said. That's in part because Medicare, which is available to people who are 65 or older, provides enrollees with relatively comprehensive coverage. As of mid-2024, U.S. residents owed at least $220 billion in medical debt, according to data from the American Hospital Association. Health care bills have for years been a leading cause of personal bankruptcies.

Note: Two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by illnesses and medical bills. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial inequality.

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