UPDATED, June 23, to include a response from Novant. Gov. Roy Cooper encourages everyone to get a test for COVID-19, especially people who attended mass gatherings or protests. But medical providers are still catching up to new state recommendations, and online guidance from many hospital systems denies tests to exposed patients without symptoms. Experts say...
People are scratching their heads over the state’s health guidance about how schools can safely reopen. The upcoming school year won’t be normal, and COVID-19 is to blame, state officials have said. Schools will have to balance teaching students with curbing the spread of the virus. To prepare for the 2020-21 school year, state agencies...
Editor’s note: This story was updated. ACE Speedway must shut down all races. The Alamance County race track lost the first round of its lawsuit to overturn Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive orders barring most mass gatherings. Alamance County Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Thomas Lambeth on Thursday, June 11, granted the state’s request for a...
North Carolina has moved into the next phase of its COVID-19 outbreak — community transmission. But state leaders say they’re not currently planning to order residents to shelter in place. Shelter-in-place, now enacted — as of this writing — in California, one Colorado county, and soon in Illinois and probably soon in New York, requires...
As stories of the spread of coronavirus continue to circulate in the media, teachers have turned to Facebook to complain about a purported shortage of cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer needed to combat the spread of COVID-19 in their schools and classrooms. Predictably, a few petty teachers have used the crisis to prolong their tiresome...
Rural patients could get more access to dental care, as dental hygienists can now treat patients in high-need areas without direct supervision, the N.C. Rules Review Commission decided Thursday, Jan. 16. North Carolina’s rural communities are starved for dental care. Camden, Hyde, and Tyrrell counties haven’t hosted a dentist for the past decade. Almost 60...
A big change to the state Medicaid program remains unfunded, increasing the risk of costly delays in Medicaid transformation. The legislature adjourned without passing funding for Medicaid managed care — a transformation that will privatize Medicaid by paying managed care companies $30 billion over five years to cover 1.6 million low-income North Carolinians. When the...
Time is running out, and Medicaid transformation is imperiled. State representatives began questioning whether Medicaid managed care will fail under its current timeline. The concerns came during a Wednesday, Oct. 23, meeting of the House Health Committee. If a state budget isn’t passed in the next three weeks, transformation will crash into more delays. But...
Health management company Aetna has charged the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services with manipulating the process for awarding Medicaid managed care contracts to favor Blue Cross N.C. Aetna is taking legal action, asking a judge to force DHHS to award Aetna a Medicaid contract. The legal challenge, now before the N.C. Office of...
North Carolina continues to roll out Medicaid managed care, despite a lack of funding from the legislature and a lawsuit pending against one of the insurers slotted to become a managed care organization. Open enrollment for Medicaid managed care began statewide Thursday, Oct. 17. The switch to managed care is arguably the biggest transformation of...
The state Department of Health and Human Services improperly paid more than $100 million in Medicaid claims during fiscal year 2018, State Auditor Beth Wood reported. An audit released Monday, April 8, highlighted a series of errors and weaknesses in DHHS operations. Some were repeat findings from earlier audits and weren’t corrected despite recommendations from...
