Full audio of Evan Smith's interview and audience Q&A with U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville.  Full Story

3M Co. is the latest American company to stop offering health insurance plans to early retirees. Nathan Bernier of KUT News reports that more employers are looking to drop employees from coverage plans because, they say, the federal health care overhaul will make it easier for people in their 50s and 60s to find affordable policies on their own.  Full Story

In the last year, Texas probate courts approved more than $6 million in payments from private estates to court-appointed attorneys, guardians and physicians, in many cases depleting funds left to care for incapacitated people. Critics say the practice amounts to destroying the village in order to save it. Probate judges say they're simply making sure people who can't defend themselves have proper representation.

 Full Story

A federal magistrate says the medical malpractice caps Texas lawmakers instituted in 2003 should withstand a constitutional challenge.

 Full Story

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana exiles have fundamentally changed Houston, and vice-versa. The uneasy arrangement was a shotgun marriage: Many evacuees had no choice in whether or where they went, and Houstonians had no choice, for humanity's sake, but to take them in.

 Full Story

Stiles on Bill White's donor-appointees, M. Smith on a form of meritless lawsuit that's still legal in Texas, Ramshaw on what federal health care reform means for the future of physician-owned specialty hospitals, Galbraith's interview with the chairman of the Public Utility Commission, Philpott on the latest flap over federal education funding, Grissom on the finally-in-compliance Dallas County Jail, Titus on the oiled pelicans of the BP spill, Hamilton's interview with the new chancellor of the Texas State University System, Ramsey on the political and legal definitions of residency, Hu on Barack Obama's visit to Austin and Aguilar on what the U.S. could be doing to aid Mexico: The best of our best from August 9 to 13, 2010.

 Full Story

Lawmakers must fund more in-state medical residency slots if Texas wants to ward off a looming physician shortage, the presidents of the six University of Texas medical centers told the UT System Board of Regents on Wednesday.

 Full Story

Across Texas, hospital systems are scooping up physician groups and solo practitioners, scrambling to create the kinds of coordinated medical teams that federal health care reform puts a premium on. But some health care providers say the gold-rush-style push is an overreaction driven by fear of the unknown.

 Full Story

Should lawmakers pay hospitals more for refusing to induce early labor, which reduces neonatal costs and harm to mothers? Or should the state be kept out of the private decisions of patients and their physicians?

 Full Story

Wait times in Texas emergency rooms dropped by 14 minutes between 2008 and 2009, but it still takes just over 4 hours to be seen by an ER doctor, according to a new study by the health care research group Press Ganey.

 Full Story

Most of Texas' health insurance companies have fully covered the costs of the infant vaccine Prevnar 13, which prevents deadly cases of bacterial pneumonia and meningitis. The exception has been Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, which has forced physicians to make up the difference or turn babies away. But no more: On Monday, the same day The Texas Tribune asked about the reimbursement gap, BCBS reversed course. It will now cover all costs associated with the vaccine.

 Full Story

What do college students and preschoolers have in common?

 Full Story

Less than a third of the state's 3rd-to-12th-grade students can pass a physical fitness test — and that’s an improvement.

 Full Story

A quiet ideological battle is being waged yard to yard in affluent neighborhoods of San Antonio. It began with one side declaring "No socialism" in white letters on a black background. Some didn't like that message, so they changed it to read "No selfishness."

 Full Story

After Thursday's lively state hearing, where health advocates told lawmakers they were bracing for massive Medicare cuts, doctors got some rewarding news: Congress had voted to delay a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments six months.

 Full Story

Are Texas medical schools missing a social conscience? Many fare poorly in a new study that ranks them based on their contributions to meeting the nation’s health care needs.

 Full Story

Ramshaw on geriatric care in state prisons, with Miller's photo essay inside those walls; M. Smith interviews the state's newest Supreme Court justice, Debra Lehrmann; Aguilar finds fewer Mexicans seeking asylum in the U.S; Galbraith sorts out the politics of pollution and whether our air is dangerous to breathe; Thevenot discovers authorities writing tickets for misbehavior to elementary school kids; Philpott reports on early hearing about political redistricting; Kreighbaum examines fines levied against polluters and finds they're often smaller than the economic benefits of the infractions; and Stiles and Babalola spotlight some of our data projects from our first seven months online: The best of our best from May 31 to June 4, 2010.

 Full Story

Texas’ “geriatric” inmates (55 and older) make up just 7.3 percent of Texas’ 160,000-offender prison population, but they account for nearly a third of the system’s hospital costs. Prison doctors routinely offer up the oldest and sickest of them for medical parole, a way to get those who are too incapacitated to be a public threat and have just months to live out of medical beds that Texas’ quickly aging prison population needs. They’ve recommended parole for 4,000 such inmates within the last decade. But the state parole board has only agreed in a quarter of these cases, leaving the others to die in prison — and on the state’s dime.

 Full Story