Katherine Streeter for NPR |
Sibling Rivals No More Sometimes the outside perspective we most need is found close to home. When writer Robin Henig’s mom fell ill and died this year, Henig’s younger brother Paul became her go-to guy for reality checks. Psychologists and anthropologists say their research helps explain the lasting intensity and solace of the sibling bond -- in childhood and beyond.
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Yee Won Chong (left) was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, and in a strange coincidence his roommate, Brooks Nelson (right), discovered he had ovarian cancer.
Courtesy of Yee Won Chong |
Health System Fails Many Transgender Americans According to a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of public health, 31 percent of trans Americans lack regular access to health care. As NPR’s Neda Ulaby explains, that’s partly because stigma and an apparent gender mismatch with formal identification papers can make it hard to even get a job that includes health insurance. Trans people face an unemployment rate three times higher than the national average -- 15 percent versus 5 percent. Ulaby talks with trans filmmakers Brooks Nelson and Yee Won Chong about their documentary Trans Dudes With Lady Cancer, in which a doctor explains how transphobia keeps many physicians from doing thorough exams and asking the right questions.
And sometimes it’s a patient’s fear of discrimination that gets in the way of good care. Ezra David Romero reports this week from California’s central valley on the struggles of coming out to your doctor in rural America.
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Pregnant Doctor Turned Patient As an E.R. physician and Baltimore health commissioner, Dr. Leana Wen has treated plenty of patients with low incomes. But it wasn’t until she became pregnant, she says, that she started tallying up just how expensive pregnancy and childbirth can be in the U.S. for women who lack health insurance.
“One obstetrician visit would cost $150,” she writes in Shots. “With an ultrasound each time, it would be $400. A Pap smear would cost $53. One set of blood tests would add another $300. All told, my prenatal care with all visits and tests included would be over $10,000. This is not counting labor and delivery, which in my area is estimated to be up to $30,000 for a vaginal birth and $50,000 for a cesarean section.”
As lawmakers continue to weigh cuts to Medicaid and waivers of the essential benefits included under the Affordable Care Act, Wen says she remembers the trade-offs some patients had to make in the days before the ACA became law. “I treated women who were priced out of prenatal care,” she says, “whose babies suffered the consequences in the form of preventable diseases, prematurity, birth defects, and even death.”
Wen is now the mom of a healthy child, and she advocates strengthening America’s social safety net for everyone.
“If the health of families and future of children are core values in our society,” she writes in Shots, “then we should implement policies that foster these values. We need health care for all regardless of ability to pay; paid parental and sick leave; and affordable child care.”
Food for thought. Safe travels this holiday season!
Your Shots editor, Deborah Franklin
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