Scott Hensley

Americans are living and working longer than ever. And Medicare, the health plan that's supposed to help senior citizens, is facing budget problems sooner rather than later.

By 2023, about 70 million people will get health care paid for by Medicare, and their tab is expected to hit ...

The Food and Drug Administration has a mystery on its hands.

Thousands of dogs and at least 10 cats have become sick after eating various forms of jerky for pets over the past few years. Some 580 animals have died, the agency says. But it's not sure why.

Some of ...

Starting in January, it will get a lot easier for millions of people across to the country to qualify for Medicaid.

Adults making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($15,856 in 2013) will be able to sign up for Medicaid, under an expansion paid for entirely ...

Could health insurance be the remedy for 200,000 deaths a year from heart attacks and strokes? It might be a big part of the cure.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about one-quarter of the 800,000 deaths from those causes could be avoided, according to a

If you've had problems sleeping and have taken a pill to help, you're not alone.

About 9 million American adults had taken sleeping pills in the past month, according to findings from a detailed nationwide survey conducted between 2005 and 2010.

Overall, about 4 percent of people 20 and older ...

Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness, is back in Florida.

A handful of cases have been confirmed in Martin and St. Lucie counties in the past week. The cases there prompted a public health alert. Another case was seen in Miami-Dade, where officials issued a mosquito-borne disease advisory.

Dengue ...

Are doctors so fed up with Medicare's stagnant pay and bureaucratic rules that they're bailing out of the program?

Short answer: Yes, some are. Long answer: Not as many as you might have thought.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently, the number of doctors who opted out of ...

Boys born in the West are more likely to skip circumcision than they are to have the once common procedure.

It's a dramatic change over the past 32 years. Back in 1979, about two-thirds of boys out West got circumcised in the hospital soon after they were born. By 2010, ...

How risky are psychedelic drugs to mental health? Not nearly as much as you might have imagined.

People who had taken LSD, psilocybin (the brain-bending chemical in magic mushrooms) or mescaline at any time in their lives were no more likely than those who hadn't to wind up in mental ...

Finding doctors to work in the countryside isn't easy.

About 20 percent the U.S. population lives in rural areas, but only about 11 percent of doctors practice there. The lure of cities and suburbs has been hard to overcome. And doctor shortages, already acute in some rural areas, are ...

If you thought the doldrums of August meant a lower boil for controversy over the rollout of the federal health law, you're mostly right.

But the federal government released a list of grants going to groups that will help people figure out how to buy health insurance on the ...

When your doctor is looking to make a diagnosis or choose a treatment, she often checks to see what the experts recommend.

Guidelines from these groups of leading doctors help the average physician decide if it's time to prescribe drugs to lower a patient's cholesterol or turn to medicines for ...

A cancer diagnosis can be downright frightening. And after the initial shock, there can be gruelling rounds of treatment.

But sometimes treatment can be a waste, because the condition a doctor labels as cancer isn't really much of a health threat.

The National Cancer Institute convened a group of specialists ...

We're all getting older. And in the U.S., the population is aging pretty quickly.

Obesity, sedentary lifestyles and all, we can expect to live longer than ever.

An American boy born in 2008, for instance, can expect to live to the ripe old age of 75, according to the ...

Silly me. I thought "rent-seeking" was something only landlords did.

But economists have their own way of looking at the world. To them, rent-seeking is a term for describing how someone snags a bigger share of a pie rather than making a pie bigger, as the venerable Economist explains ...

To pediatricians, guns are a health issue.

Firearms remain a leading cause of death and injury for young people. The doctors say the evidence shows that homes are safer for kids, and adults for that matter, when guns aren't around.

Pediatricians say doctors should ask their patients — or ...

When it comes to sensitive health information, government-run websites appear to do a better job protecting your privacy than many news and commercial sites.

A brief survey published online by JAMA Internal Medicine looked at how 20 health-related websites track visitors. They ranged from the sites of the National ...

If you're looking for a deal on prescription drugs or tired of standing in line at the drugstore counter, maybe you'd be inclined to try an online pharmacy.

Perhaps you'd feel better about that choice if the site carried the name of a well-known chain, say, www.walgreen-store.com or www.c-v-s-pharmacy.com.

Well, ...

To anesthesiologists, laughing gas is no joke.

Nitrous oxide was one of the first chemicals used to make surgery and tooth-pulling painless. Back in the 1840s, Horace Wells, a dentist in Hartford, Conn., did his best to popularize it as an anesthetic agent. Despite some failed demonstrations early on, ...

While the American Medical Association may not have the clout it once did, it's still the largest single group of doctors making waves about health and the practice of medicine.

So it's not nothing when the AMA's House of Delegates approves a measure to label obesity a disease. The ...