CBS News
Worries about medical bills weigh on voters’ minds as election nears
Tom Zawierucha, 58, a building services worker in New Jersey, wishes candidates would talk more about protecting older Americans from big medical bills.
Teresa Morton, 43, a freight dispatcher in Memphis, Tennessee, with two teenagers, wants to hear more about how elected officials would help working Americans saddled with unaffordable deductibles.
Yessica Gray, 28, a customer support representative in Wisconsin, craves relief from high drug prices and medical bills that have driven her and her husband deep into debt. “How much are we going to pay?” she said. “It’s just something that’s always on my mind.”
Health care hasn’t figured prominently in this increasingly acrimonious presidential campaign. And the economy has generally topped the list of voters’ concerns.
But Americans remain intensely worried about paying for medical care, national surveys show.
Two in 3 U.S. adults in a recent nationwide poll by West Health and Gallup said they’re concerned a major health event would land them in debt. A similar share said health care isn’t getting enough attention in the campaign.
To better understand voters’ health care concerns as the 2024 campaign nears an end, KFF Health News worked with research firm PerryUndem to convene a pair of focus groups last week with 16 people from across the country. PerryUndem is a nonpartisan firm based in Washington, D.C., that studies public views on health care and other issues.
The focus group participants represented a broad swath of the electorate, with some favoring Republican candidates, and others Democrats. But nearly all shared a common complaint: Neither presidential candidate has talked enough about how they’d help people struggling to pay for medical care.
“You don’t really hear anything much about health care costs,” said Bob Groegler, 46, who works in residential financing in eastern Pennsylvania. Groegler said he’s worried he may never be able to retire because he won’t have enough money to pay his medical bills.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, hasn’t offered a detailed health care agenda, though he criticizes current laws and said he has “concepts of a plan” to improve the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare.
Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, has laid out more detailed health care proposals, including building on legislation signed by President Joe Biden to lower patients’ bills.
In 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which limits how much Medicare enrollees must pay out-of-pocket for prescription drugs, including a $35 monthly cap on insulin. The legislation also provides additional federal aid to help Americans buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, though this aid will expire unless Congress and the president renew it next year.
Harris has said she will expand the aid and push for new assistance to Medicare enrollees who need home care. She also has pledged to continue federal efforts to relieve medical debt, a nationwide problem that burdens about 100 million people.
But most of the focus group participants said they knew little about these proposals, complaining that hot-button issues like abortion have dominated the campaign.
Many also expressed deep skepticism that either Harris or Trump would do much to lighten the burden of medical bills.
“I believe they’re out of touch with our reality,” said Renata Bobakova, 46, a teacher and mother outside Cleveland. “We never know when we’ll get sick. We never know when we’ll fall down or sprain an ankle. And prices really can be astronomical. … I’m constantly worried about that.”
Bobakova, who is from Slovakia, said she went back to Europe to give birth to her daughter 10 years ago to avoid crippling medical debt she knew she’d incur in this country. Parents with private health coverage face on average more than $3,000 in medical bills related to a pregnancy and childbirth that aren’t covered by insurance.
Other focus group participants said they or people they knew had left the country to get cheaper prescription drugs. The U.S. has the highest medical prices in the world, research shows.
Several focus group participants, such as Kevin Gaudette, 64, a retired semiconductor engineer in North Carolina, blamed large hospitals, drug companies, and insurers for blocking efforts to lower patients’ costs to protect their profits. “I think everybody has their finger in the pie,” Gaudette said.
Martha Chapman, 64, who is also retired and lives in Philadelphia, pointed to what she called “corporate greed.” “I just don’t think it’s going to change,” she said.
In the closing days of the campaign, that cynicism represents a particular problem for Harris, said PerryUndem co-founder Michael Perry, who led the two focus groups.
Harris has tried to distinguish herself as the candidate who is more serious about policy and more sympathetic to voters’ economic struggles, Perry said. And in recent weeks, she’s begun airing new ads highlighting health care issues.
But even focus group participants who said they lean Democratic seemed to blame both candidates for not addressing Americans’ health care concerns. “They’re not feeling listened to,” Perry said.
Many of the participants nevertheless continued to express hope that an issue as important as health care would someday get the attention of elected officials, regardless of political party.
“We’re all human beings here. We’re all people just trying to make it,” said Zawierucha, the building services worker in New Jersey. “If we get sick or have to go in and get something done, we should have that peace of mind that we can go in there and not have to worry about paying it off for the next 20 years.”
“Just give us some peace of mind,” he said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
Washington — Two weeks after setting a nationwide deadline for removal of lead pipes, the Biden administration is imposing strict new limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and child-care facilities.
A final rule announced Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency sets limits on lead dust on floors and window sills in pre-1978 residences and child-care facilities to levels so low they can’t be detected.
Paint that contains lead was banned in 1978, but more than 30 million American homes are believed to still contain it, including nearly 4 million homes where children under the age of 6 live. Lead paint can chip off when it deteriorates or is disturbed, especially during home remodeling or renovation.
“There is no safe level of lead,” said Michal Freedhoff, EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. The new rule will bring the United States “closer to eradicating lead-based paint hazards from homes and child care facilities once and for all,” she said.
The EPA estimates the new rule will reduce the lead exposures of up to 1.2 million people per year, including 178,000 to 326,000 children under age 6.
Lead is a neurotoxin that can irreversibly harm brain development in children, lower IQ, cause behavioral problems and lead to lifelong health effects. It also affects other organs, including the liver and kidneys.
The new rule, which takes effect early next year, targets levels of lead dust generated by paint. Currently, 10 micrograms per square foot is considered hazardous on floors, and a concentration 10 times that high is considered hazardous on window sills. The new rule brings both of those levels down to no detectable lead.
The proposed rule also would reduce what level is allowed when a lead-abatement contractor finishes work on a property where lead has been identified as a problem. These levels would be 5 micrograms per square foot on the floor and 40 micrograms per square foot for sills.
Individuals and firms that perform abatement work must be certified and follow specific work practices. Testing is required afterward to ensure dust-lead levels are below the new standards.
Environmental justice and public health experts called the EPA rule long overdue, noting that lead poisoning disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.
“We can all breathe a little easier now that the EPA has significantly lowered its dust lead standard to protect children,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York-based advocacy group.
Shepard, who serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said public health experts have long understood there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood, yet New York state leads the nation in cases of children with elevated blood levels. Black children in Harlem living below the poverty line are twice as likely to suffer from lead poisoning as poor white children, she said.
The U.S. government has gradually been reducing the standard for what counts as poisonous levels of lead in children’s blood, with the most recent change occurring in 2021. But the EPA rule marks an effort to take more proactive action.
“When you are relying on the blood lead level in children to indicate whether there is lead in the environment, we are basically using the children as canaries in the mine,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a Boston College biology professor who directs the school’s Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good.
The National Child Care Association said when the lead rule was proposed last year that it could hurt many financially struggling child-care centers – especially those in low-income neighborhoods, where the facilities tend to be older. Without appropriate federal funding, the rule could push small, local child-care centers to close, the group said.
Earlier this month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $420 million in grants to remove lead hazards from homes, including HUD-assisted homes. Additional HUD grants will continue to be available to help with lead paint removal, the White House said.
An Indiana man has been sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 killing of a 17-year-old girl who was found dead in a river after she failed to return home from her job at a church camp.
A Noble County judge sentenced Fred Bandy Jr., 69, on Tuesday to a life term with the possibility of parole in Laurel Jean Mitchell’s August 1975 death. The Goshen man was convicted of first-degree murder this month following a bench trial.
A message was left seeking comment from Bandy’s attorney Wednesday.
He was charged along with John Wayne Lehman, 69, of Auburn, Indiana, last year in Mitchell’s killing. Lehman was sentenced to eight years in prison this month after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder.
Mitchell was found drowned in the Elkhart River on Aug. 7, 1975, the morning after she failed to return home in North Webster, about 140 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
WTTV
Although Mitchell’s cause of death was ruled as drowning, police say the autopsy report suggested that she “had fought for her life,” so police initiated a murder investigation.
Prosecutors charged Bandy and Lehman in Mitchell’s killing in February 2023, nearly a half-century later.
Lehman said in an August deposition that Bandy raped Mitchell and drowned her. Lehman denied participating in the rape or the murder and said his fear of Bandy kept him from trying to stop the crimes, The News-Sun of Kendallville reported.
According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators said they believed Bandy and Lehman “forcibly, deliberately drowned” Mitchell after taking her to the river in Bandy’s car.
A DNA profile was obtained in recent years through testing on Mitchell’s clothing, which was saved along with other evidence collected in 1975. According to the affidavit, Bandy voluntarily provided a DNA sample in December 2022 to state police, and testing determined he was 13 billion times “more likely to be the contributor of the DNA in Laurel J. Mitchell’s clothing than any other unknown person.”
The DNA testing came after three people who were teens at the time of Mitchell’s killing tied Bandy and Lehman to the crime based on incriminating comments they had made about her death, the affidavit states.
CBS affiliate WTTV reported that because Bandy had to be sentenced by 1975 standards, the potential outcomes were either life with the possibility of parole or the death sentence, prosecutors said. The state’s death penalty as of 1975 was later declared unconstitutional, ruling out that option.
CBS News
New Zealand airport with 3-minute cap on farewell hugs “surprised how much global interest” there’s been
Wellington — A New Zealand airport has imposed a three-minute limit on farewell hugs, sparking a worldwide debate over how long to cling on for a cuddle. Bosses at the international airport in the southern city of Dunedin say they were surprised by the viral response to their new rule in the car drop-off zone.
“To keep things moving smoothly, we’ve installed new signage, including the ‘Max hug time 3 minutes’ sign,” said airport chief executive Daniel De Bono. “It’s our way of being a little quirky and reminding people that the drop-off zone is for quick farewells.”
“And don’t worry,” added De Bono, “just a 20-second hug is enough to release oxytocin and serotonin, the happy hormones that boost well-being, so three minutes is plenty of time to say goodbye and get your dose of happiness.”
Sarah Soper/AP
People who want a longer hug can use the parking lot, where the first 15 minutes are free, he added.
The hug restriction made headlines worldwide — and prompted a divided online response.
“I’m just glad there’s no minimum hug time. A ‘see ya soon’ suffices,” one woman commented on the airport’s Facebook page.
“Hug Police!? This is just weird! Hugs are proven to have many benefits not to mention mental health,” said another poster.
The small airport, which was used by fewer than 1 million passengers last year, said it had imposed the hug time limit in September, with little initial reaction.
“We have just been surprised how much global interest there has been,” said the airport’s marketing and communications executive, Sarah Soper.
St. Louis County OKs $1.4M for upgrades to Damiano Center, a makeshift shelter, while Chum expands
Minneapolis has 11 pop-up early voting sites. Here’s how to find them.
EPA finalizes stricter rules limiting kids’ exposure to lead paint
St. Louis County OKs $1.4M for upgrades to Damiano Center, a makeshift shelter, while Chum expands
Minneapolis has 11 pop-up early voting sites. Here’s how to find them.