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Ten of the positions are vacant but 16 employees would be laid off, said health director Dr. Kanika Cunningham at a budget hearing Tuesday.

New blood donation center opened Tuesday in Arnold, where new mixed-reality headsets were also rolled out to help distract donors who may be anxious about giving blood.

Washington University, St. Louis University, the Saint Louis Zoo, and other local institutions are bringing children into Forest Park to show them wildlife can thrive in urban areas.

“You do it nicely, ‘cause it really does matter how it looks.” So says Gracie (Julianne Moore) to Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) in Todd Haynes’ May December. Ostensibly, she’s talking about arranging the maraschino cherries in a pineapple upside-down cake.

An Illinois ban on high-power semiautomatic weapons is facing a new challenge. Republican State Representative Dan Caulkins is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law.

MoDOT is hosting an informational meeting about the Interstate 55 Corridor Improvement Project.

A new Panera is opening in O'Fallon, Missouri, on Thursday.

A new Chick-fil-A is opening in University City.

A St. Louis organization is continuing to support unhoused youth in the region. 'Covenant House Missouri' is holding its annual 'SleepOut' in St. Louis' on Thursday.

FOX 2 is partnering with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the 67th annual 'Old Newsboys Day.'

A strike is taking place Thursday by Starbucks union workers at eight St. Louis coffee shops.

There's a large police presence in south St. Louis responding to a reported stabbing.

A crucial court hearing on a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s controversial abortion ban is set to take place on Thursday. The case could have major implications for the future of Missouri’s law, which bans most abortions.

Weiquan Jiang and Zixuan Hu, co-owners of Dumplings and Tea (137 Chesterfield Towne Center, Chesterfield; 636-778-9090), both hail from the southern part of China. Though their hometowns are in different regions — Jiang is more from the center-south and Hu is from the southeast — they take pride in the area's unique culinary heritage and have fond memories of the particular style of bao and dumplings they grew up eating.

by Maya Miller and Robin Fields

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story is part of a partnership with Scripps News.

In North Carolina, lawmakers outraged that breast cancer patients were being denied reconstructive surgeries passed a measure forcing health insurers to pay for them. In Arizona, legislators intervened to protect patients with diabetes, requiring health plans to cover their supplies. Elected officials in more than a dozen states, from Oklahoma to California, wrote laws demanding that insurance companies pay for emergency services.

Over the last four decades, states have enacted hundreds of laws dictating precisely what insurers must cover so that consumers aren’t driven into debt or forced to go without medicines or procedures. But health plans have violated these mandates at least dozens of times in the last five years, ProPublica found.

In the most egregious cases, patients have been denied coverage for lifesaving care. On Wednesday, a ProPublica investigation traced how a Michigan company would not pay for an FDA-approved cancer medication for a patient, Forrest VanPatten, even though a state law requires insurers to cover cancer drugs. That expensive treatment offered VanPatten his only chance for survival. The father of two died at the age 50, still battling the insurer for access to the therapy. Regulators never intervened.

These laws don’t apply to every type of health plan, but they are supposed to provide protections for tens of millions of people. AHIP, a trade group that used to be known as America’s Health Insurance Plans, said new mandates are costly for consumers and states, “tie insurers’ hands and limit plan innovation” by requiring specific benefits. Nevertheless, its members take steps to make sure they are following these mandates, the trade group said.

State insurance departments are responsible for enforcing these laws, but many are ill-equipped to do so, researchers, consumer advocates and even some regulators say. These agencies oversee all types of insurance, including plans covering cars, homes and people’s health. Yet they employed less people last year than they did a decade ago. Their first priority is making sure plans remain solvent; protecting consumers from unlawful denials often takes a backseat.

“They just honestly don’t have the resources to do the type of auditing that we would need,” said Sara McMenamin, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego, who has been studying the implementation of state mandates.

Agencies often don’t investigate health insurance denials unless policyholders or their families complain. But denials can arrive at the worst moments of people’s lives, when they have little energy to wrangle with bureaucracy. People with plans purchased on HealthCare.gov appealed less than 1% of the time, one study found.

ProPublica surveyed every state’s insurance agency and identified just 45 enforcement actions since 2018 involving denials that have violated coverage mandates. Regulators sometimes treat consumer complaints as one-offs, forcing an insurer to pay for that individual’s treatment without addressing whether a broader group has faced similar wrongful denials.

When regulators have decided to dig deeper, they’ve found that a single complaint is emblematic of a systemic issue impacting thousands of people.

In 2017, a woman complained to Maine’s insurance regulator, saying her carrier, Aetna, broke state law by incorrectly processing claims and overcharging her for services related to the birth of her child. After being contacted by the state, Aetna acknowledged the mistake and issued a refund.

That winter, the woman gave birth to a second child, and Aetna did it again. She filed another complaint. This time, when the state made Aetna pay up, it also demanded broader data on childbirth claims. Regulators discovered that the insurer had miscalculated claims related to more than 1,000 births over a four-year period. Aetna issued refunds totaling $1.6 million and agreed to pay a $150,000 fine if it failed to follow conditions listed in a consent agreement.

It was a rare victory. The potential fine, though, constituted less than .002% of the $6.63 billion in profit recorded by Aetna’s parent company, CVS Health, that year.

Aetna spokesperson Alex Kepnes said the company resolved the matter in 2019 to the state’s satisfaction. Kepnes declined to answer why the insurer failed to fix the issue after the first complaint.

Watch the Scripps News Report “Hope Denied”

Patients often don’t know what care they’re entitled to under state mandates. And one survey found that 86% of people with health insurance don’t know which government agency to call for help. Knowing how to navigate the system can make all the difference to patients socked with giant medical bills.

In December 2022, Samantha Slabyk felt a sudden sharp pain in her lower right abdomen. The San Marcos, Texas, resident took herself to an outpatient emergency clinic, but after a CT scan revealed she had appendicitis, doctors sent her in an ambulance to a nearby hospital. “Everyone indicated that this was an emergency situation that needed to be dealt with promptly,” Slabyk said.

Texas has long had a law requiring insurers to cover medical treatment needed by patients in emergencies. Yet that month, her insurer, Ambetter, wrote in a letter that it would not pay the $93,000 bill because the appendectomy took place at an out-of-network facility.

Slabyk was studying to be a physician’s assistant and had been an EMT. Her fiance’s brother-in-law worked in medical billing and gave her advice on how to push back, as did her mom — whose cancer diagnosis meant she often interacted with health insurers. These connections and experiences gave Slabyk an unusual grasp of her rights and how the system works. Still, every time she reached someone at Ambetter, she felt like she was being stonewalled. Slabyk felt lost.

You can find more information about your state's laws on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website.

By June, she was so fed up she decided to submit a complaint to the Texas Department of Insurance. Five days later, she received a call from an Ambetter employee apologizing and saying they would process the procedure as an emergency and pay up.

Centene, Ambetter’s parent company, did not respond to emailed questions or a phone call seeking comment. (The state informed Slabyk it closed the complaint.)

“I was around a lot of people who were knowledgeable and giving me very good advice,” Slabyk said. “And so if you’re just like, on your own, not in the health care system whatsoever, I mean, I just, I can totally see giving up.”

California had to pass not one but two laws to compel insurers to pay for infertility treatments. And one lawmaker said insurers are still saying no often enough that he’s considering introducing a third.

After legislators began requiring such coverage in 1990, some health plans took a narrow view. They refused to pay to preserve eggs, sperm or reproductive tissue for patients facing treatments for diseases like cancer that could impair their fertility. Some patients were delaying chemotherapy to try to get pregnant beforehand or going into debt to pay for treatments out-of-pocket. Regulators forced insurers to pay in some cases, but elected officials worried that other patients were being denied this care.

State Sen. Anthony Portantino worked with colleagues to amend the law in 2019, clarifying that these treatments must be covered. Even so, insurers have been putting up roadblocks.

“Some of the insurers are taking a very strict approach that it has to be chemo,” said Portantino, who is a Democrat. For instance, patients who need cancer surgeries that could leave them infertile have faced denials.

Portantino said he plans to work with California’s largest health insurance regulator to clarify that fertility preservation must be covered more broadly. If that does not work, he said he will turn to legislation once again.

Other regulators are trying to bolster enforcement on the front end. Health insurers submit annual filings to the states where they operate, detailing the treatments and services the company will and won’t cover. Regulators check these policies to figure out whether an insurer is complying with state mandates. In Vermont, the insurance department is using federal grant money to work with an outside company to improve these reviews. Through staff training and education, the department hopes to catch insurers not following state laws before Vermont residents face wrongful denials.

Not all health plans have to follow state mandates. About 65% of employees who get insurance through their jobs work for companies that pay directly for health care. Those companies often hire insurers solely to process claims. Known as self-funded plans, they are regulated by the federal government and exempt from state coverage requirements. Employers increasingly are turning to these types of plans, which tend to be cheaper, partly because they don’t have to cover care that states require. (The federal government also imposes coverage mandates, but state laws can be more robust.)

For patients, this can mean fewer protections from denials.

When 57-year-old Sayeh Peterson, a nonsmoker, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, her doctors ordered genetic testing to identify the cause. Those tests revealed that a rare gene mutation was, in fact, the culprit for Peterson’s disease and gave doctors the information they needed to create a treatment that targeted the mutation. Her state, Arizona, requires insurers to cover such testing, but Peterson’s UnitedHealthcare plan was self-funded by her husband’s employer, so the law didn’t apply. She and her husband were left with more than $12,000 in bills.

In response to questions, UnitedHealth spokesperson Maria Gordon Shydlo wrote that “there is not enough medical evidence to support use of all those tests.”

As Peterson undergoes a treatment plan tailored to the genetic test results, she is continuing to appeal the denials months later. “We’re told that we have this great insurance,” Peterson said. “But then they deny coverage for the testing that determined what my treatment would be. How do you even get your head around this?”

Do You Have Insights Into Dental and Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

Doris Burke contributed research.

A conversation with Forward Through Ferguson executive director Annissa McCaskill

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times for LGBTQ rights in St. Louis. On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign released their annual Municipal Equality Index, which evaluates more than 500 cities across the country on how inclusive their laws, policies, and services are for LGBTQ residents.

A panel of Missouri lawmakers have spent several hours in recent weeks debating whether or not aliens and robots should be banned on marijuana product labels. Humans, animals and fruits are already not allowed — an effort by the state to keep products out of the hands of children. But would robots fall under that […]

The post Missouri legislators criticize regulations targeting cannabis packaging aimed at kids appeared first on Missouri Independent.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, joined about 100 tenant advocates at a press event outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday to demand action on the housing crisis. Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to bolster tenant protections and rent regulations. The People’s […]

The post ‘Out of control’: Advocates rally in D.C. calling for action on housing crisis appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Workers at the General Motors plant in Wentzville have voted down what union officials have described as a record contract offer.