Julie Rovner

The Supreme Court gave lower courts additional instructions to try to reach an accommodation on balancing religious rights and no-cost access to contraception.

Many say the polarized debate over Obamacare has overshadowed the real issues in the American health insurance market.

Kaiser Health News' Julie Rovner explores why increasing competition in health insurance by allowing sales of policies across state lines might not be such a hot idea after all.

For the fourth time in five years, the justices consider a requirement of the Affordable Care Act that most health plans provide women access to birth control without copays.

The fate of the controversial Texas abortion law is in the hands of the Supreme Court, and a decision isn't expected before June. But how this particular law reached the high court and how its opponents have gathered evidence to strike it down represent fresh twists in an acrimonious national ...

Nearly six years after its enactment, the Affordable Care Act remains a hot issue in the presidential race – in both parties.

"Our health care is a horror show," said GOP candidate Donald Trump at the Republican debate in South Carolina in December. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, winner of the ...

Health care has emerged as one of the flash points in the Democratic presidential race.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been a longtime supporter of a concept he calls "Medicare for All," a health system that falls under the heading of single- payer health care.

Sanders released more details ...

The federal government has announced a $157 million project to help hospitals and doctors link Medicare and Medicaid patients with needed social services that sometimes have a bigger effect on their health than medical interventions.

Even with medical care easily available, patients are often limited in their ability to ...

Thursday's announcement by Kaiser Permanente that it plans to open its own medical school in Southern California in 2019 has attracted a lot of attention in the health care community.

The nonprofit, national provider of managed health care says it plans to train students in its own style of ...

How stressful is medical training? So bad that in a class that encouraged medical students to express their feelings by drawing comics, nearly half of them depicted their supervisors as monsters, researchers say.

Students imagined the workplace as dank dungeons, represented supervising physicians as fiendish, foul-mouthed monsters, and themselves as ...

It's not enough anymore to learn how to size up the symptoms of a particular patient, say specialists in bioinformatics. Modern doctors need to learn to see patterns in huge data sets, too.

While the Republicans running for president are united in their desire to repeal the federal health law, Democrat Hillary Clinton is fashioning her own health care agenda to tackle out-of-pocket costs.

But would her proposals solve the problem?

In addition to defending the Affordable Care Act this week, Clinton ...

The percentage of Americans without health insurance dropped by nearly three percentage points between 2013 and 2014, according the U.S. Census Bureau, from 13.3 to 10.4 percent. Put another way, 8.8 million more people were insured in 2014 than the year before.

The annual study from Census is considered ...

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood will clearly be a flashpoint when Congress returns this week from its summer break.

But the fate of many other health programs, from the National Institutes of Health to efforts to reduce teen pregnancy, hang in the balance as well, as lawmakers decide whether and ...

The undercover videos purporting to show officials of Planned Parenthood bargaining over the sale of fetal tissue have made the promise to defund the organization one of the most popular refrains of Republicans running for president.

It's actually a much easier promise to make than to fulfill. But that's not ...

Updated at 6:52 p.m. ET

Republican calls to defund Planned Parenthood over its alleged handling of fetal tissue for research are louder than ever. But they are just the latest in a decades-long drive to halt federal support for the group.

This round aims squarely at the collection of fetal ...

There's a battle brewing behind the scenes to keep health plans affordable for consumers. The Obama administration weighed in this week, sending letters to insurance regulators in every state and Washington, D.C., that ask them to take a closer look at rate requests before granting them.

Under the Affordable Care ...

Women are saving a lot of money as a result of a health law requirement that insurance cover most forms of prescription contraceptives with no additional out-of-pocket costs, a study finds. But the amount of those savings and the speed with which the savings accrued surprised researchers.

The average birth ...

Almost no one disputes that the implementation of the federal health law has helped Americans who were previously uninsured gain coverage. But exactly how much has the uninsured rate dropped?

A whole lot, says President Obama.

"Nearly 1 in 3 uninsured Americans have already been covered — more than 16 ...

By the end of June, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on King v. Burwell, a case challenging the validity of the federal tax subsidies that help millions of Americans buy health insurance if they don't get coverage through an employer. If the court rules against the Obama administration, ...