KFF Health News

Prevention Efforts Increasingly See Suicide Through a Broader Lens

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But that doesn’t make it normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness. That’s led prevention efforts to typically focus on connecting people with treatment in moments of crisis. But that’s changing. There’s a growing movement asking a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? During the covid pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression spiked — not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. People were out of work, isolated, struggling to make ends meet. That led many people in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatments and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live. Decades of research supports this idea. Interventions that improve

Delays in Visa Program Threaten Placement of Hundreds of Doctors in Underserved Areas

Hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country if the federal government doesn’t rapidly process their visa waiver applications, which have been languishing since the fall and winter, immigration attorneys say. The waiver program, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, allows physicians who aren’t U.S. citizens to stay in the country while transitioning from the visa they used during their training to temporary worker status. In exchange, the doctors agree to work in underserved areas for at least three years. “It will be the patients that suffer the most because in about three months, there’s going to be hundreds of places that are not going to have a physician that should have,” said a psychiatrist caught in the delay. The doctor — whom KFF Health News agreed not to identify because they fear government reprisal — was among hundreds who applied this year for a J-1 visa waiver through the HHS Exchange Visitor Program. If they receive one, the psychiatrist — who attended medical school in their home country in Europe before coming to the U.S. for their residency and fellowship — would work with vulnerable and disadvantaged

Gavin Newsom, Early Champion of Single-Payer, Moderates in the Face of Fiscal Limits

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In his earliest days in the governor’s office, Democrat Gavin Newsom huddled with his advisers to consider how to realize a key campaign promise: transforming a healthcare system replete with insurance company intermediaries into the nation’s first state-run single-payer model providing comprehensive coverage to all residents, similar to those in Canada and Taiwan. He’d need to secure tax increases to help cover the high cost of a single-payer system, once pegged at about $500 billion a year, and Republican President Donald Trump, then in his first term, would have to give California permission to use federal funding to convert the system of coverage from one determined by employment, age, or income. Neither was politically feasible. Instead, in the years that followed, Newsom muscled through a compassionate healthcare agenda that poured billions into new benefits, including Medi-Cal coverage for low-income immigrants without legal status and incarcerated people leaving jail or prison, as well as programs for people experiencing homelessness in America’s richest and most populous state. Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, now includes housing services, including six months of free rent for those in need, and home-delivered healthy meals for low-income Californians with chronic health conditions. He made