Operational bed capacity at end of September stood at 5,518, up by 758 beds and 16 per cent YoY compared to Sep 2025. Bed occupancy for the quarter was at 77 per cent, with Occupied Bed Days (OBDs) up by 13 per cent YoY.
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What’s scarier than ghosts and goblins? How about measles, unaffordable dental care, and an insurance claim denied by artificial intelligence?
Nearly 80 healthcare-themed haikus crept into our inbox this Halloween season. Meet the winners of KFF Health News’ eighth annual Halloween haiku contest below.
Follow KFF Health News’ social media accounts (X, Instagram, and Facebook) for more of our favorites. Enjoy!
1st Place
(Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: DJ Zelle)
Which is scarier? Jack-o’-lanterns and ghouls, or Measles and lettuce?
— DJ Zelle
2nd Place
(Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; John Fedyna)
Drac on a budget: His fangs are ineffective, Dental too costly.
While Halloween may be coming to an end, KFF Health News reporting continues year-round. Send us your haikus at any time for possible inclusion in our Morning Briefing: https://kffhealthnews.org/contact-haiku/.
2025 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners
2024 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners
(Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Crystal Decker) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Sasha Zitter) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Siri Palreddy)
2023 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners
(Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Madeline Steward) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Tom Cook) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Brynne McBride)
2022 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners
(Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Paul Hughes-Cromwick) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Micki Jackson) (Illustration: Oona Zenda/KFF Health News; Haiku: Michael L. Millenson)
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
When Ashley Porter began slurring her speech one October day four years ago, doctors suspected a stroke. A spinal tap, an MRI, dozens of blood draws, another MRI, and a night spent at the hospital were followed, finally, by an answer: Porter had multiple sclerosis.
Her shock turned to outrage, she said, when she received the roughly $180,000 hospital bill, even though insurance covered most of it.
Porter and her husband have insurance through two separate employer plans yet have spent at least $75,000 a year — roughly a quarter of their gross income — on medical expenses since her diagnosis.
“It is terrifying,” said Porter, who works in transportation sales in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I can’t imagine having this disease and not making the kind of income that we make.”
The average premium for a California family with employer-sponsored coverage has hit nearly $28,400 a year, up 24% since 2022, much more than workers’ wages. Amid skyrocketing healthcare costs, the gubernatorial candidates’ proposals remain short on specifics about funding or implementation to address this top priority for voters in the nation’s largest healthcare market.
“People are hungry for pretty aggressive action on healthcare spending,” said Kristof Stremikis, director of market analysis and insight at the California Health Care Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization specializing in healthcare research and education.
“Regardless of who our new governor is and who our new state policymakers are in the next year, they have a mandate,” he said.
Nearly two-thirds of Californians worry about receiving an unexpected medical bill, surpassing financial concerns such as the cost of rent or food, according to a 2025 CHCF-NORC survey. Six in 10 said they or a family member had skipped care because of cost.
He has also said that Congress should restore an estimated $900 billion in federal Medicaid cuts and reinstate enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed to expire, causing insurance premium payments to increase for millions of Americans. Both are national Democratic priorities outside a governor’s purview.
Former Fox News host Steve Hilton, Becerra’s Republican opponent, has said he’d build on existing state laws governing price transparency and prescription drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers to lower costs. And he wants to partially replace Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program, with personal healthcare accounts of up to $10,000 a year — a concept unlikely to gain traction in a statehouse controlled by Democrats.
Both candidates declined multiple interview requests to discuss their health policies.
Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor, mingles with
supporters at a rally in Santa Rosa on Oct. 8. (Christine Mai-Duc/KFF Health News)
Steve Hilton, Republican candidate for California governor, speaks to the media at a campaign event on June 11. (Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Healthcare Costs and Consolidation
From 1970 to 2025, U.S. health expenditures ballooned from $75 billion to a projected $5.7 trillion, rising nearly 40% from 2020. By 2032, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services predicts, health spending will account for more than a fifth of the U.S. economy.
Payments to hospitals, doctors, and clinics account for much of the inflation, along with rising prescription drug prices. Research shows that escalating mergers among physician practices, hospital groups, and insurers further stifled competition and raised prices.
In the 2018 lawsuit Becerra filed against Sutter Health, he accused the health system of using its market dominance to drive up hospital prices in Northern California, where procedures cost as much as 30% more than in other parts of the state.
The Sacramento-based not-for-profit system, which admitted no wrongdoing, paid an unprecedented $575 million fine and agreed to stop certain business practices, including imposing “all-or-nothing” terms on insurers that forced them to contract with the system’s entire network of clinics and hospitals.
“It was the biggest victory in antitrust and hospitals ever,” said Richard Scheffler, director of the Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare at the University of California-Berkeley. A report by the center, which conducts economic research on health policy topics, formed the basis of Becerra’s suit.
“But things change,” Scheffler said.
While the settlement likely discouraged similar practices by other hospital chains, he said, any relief has since been eclipsed by rapid consolidation in the healthcare industry.
At a press event in October, Becerra said he would work with the next state attorney general to “continue to look at the types of practices in healthcare that drive up costs.”
Hilton has said that he wants to increase competition by producing more generic drugs through California’s CalRx initiative, which aims to cut drug prices. He has said he wants to allow consumers to pick cheaper, pared-down insurance plans and force healthcare providers to make their prices more transparent.
Hospitals Under the Scope
Health economists say rising healthcare costs eat up money that employers might otherwise use for raises or new hires, depressing wages. That can be a double whammy for workers already struggling to meet basic needs and, consumer advocates warn, could increase medical debt, which 40% of California adults already report carrying.
Kia Frazier-Hill and her husband didn’t expect to be among them. She knew it would be expensive when he landed in the emergency room and was hospitalized at an out-of-network facility.
The astronomical prices gave her sticker shock: $17,507 for a night in the intensive care unit; $427.89 for a test for flu, covid, and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus; $2.60 for a single tablet of generic, regular-strength Tylenol. Their bronze-tier plan from Covered California, the state’s ACA insurance marketplace, paid the vast majority, nearly $60,000, but the $7,500 balance has been in collections for months.
“We’re drowning,” Frazier-Hill said. “It just doesn’t make any sense what they’re charging.”
Researchers have found that hospital prices are even higher in uncompetitive markets.
California is trying to corral such runaway health costs through its Office of Health Care Affordability, which has directed most health systems, hospitals, insurers, and large healthcare provider groups to hold their spending growth to 3.5% this year.
Hospital and doctor groups, which have donated to Becerra’s campaign, say the cap is too low and will limit patient care, not improve efficiency.
“Hospitals have a mission to take care of people, save lives, and that costs money,” said Amber Ott, senior vice president of financial policy for the California Hospital Association, which is challenging the affordability board’s caps in court. “It’s hard to look at just one piece of the ecosystem and say that’s where the problem is.”
While hospitals are not the only drivers of high costs, they are the largest. According to the state, at least 40% of total health spending by commercial insurance plans went to hospitals in 2024, the latest data available.
People gather for an Aug. 13 town hall focused on high healthcare costs hosted by
Health Access California, a health consumer advocacy organization, in Gilroy, California.
Many residents in the region work on farms or in factories and have limited access to health
insurance. (Christine Mai-Duc/KFF Health News)
Low-Hanging Fruit
As rising healthcare costs have driven up spending by public insurance programs and put pressure on state budgets, states have taken more of a lead in tackling affordability. But they are limited in what they can do. While California has led on prescription drug price transparency and negotiating more competitive marketplace plan rates, it lags other states in some respects, said Sabrina Corlette, a co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.
“There’s a lot more they could do to rein in underlying drivers of healthcare costs,” she said of state policymakers.
Some states, for instance, have banned certain facility fees, which allow hospitals to charge higher prices than unaffiliated doctors’ offices even when services are rendered at outpatient clinics that they own. Corlette said such fees increase patient costs while incentivizing hospitals to gobble up more clinics and physician practices.
Oregon capped the payments its public employee health plans make to hospitals, reducing patients’ out-of-pocket spending on outpatient procedures by nearly 10%. Rhode Island limits hospital cost growth through an annual rate review of state-regulated health plans. California has done neither.
California healthcare advocates and researchers say there’s plenty of low-hanging policy fruit that could bring consumers more immediate relief. Insurers and providers could work to automate notoriously inefficient prior authorization procedures, while lawmakers could mandate shorter insurer response times to prior authorization requests, as New Jersey and Vermont have done.
The legislature could also broaden bans on anticompetitive contracting, much like Connecticut and Texas, or expand on Los Angeles County’s program to purchase and forgive residents’ medical debt.
Heath policy experts say even those relatively modest ideas would be a heavy lift in Sacramento, where the industry spends tens of millions of dollars annually to influence lawmakers and state agencies.
“It’s a big, complicated system, and the money is so gigantic,” said Glenn Melnick, a healthcare economist at the University of Southern California. “At some point, the legislature has to hold the line and say, ‘Look, it is the golden goose, but we’re going to have to feed it a little bit less.’”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
An expert committee constituted by Union health ministry to examine vacation and academic/on-duty leave arrangements for Central Health Service (CHS) teaching doctors had held its first meeting on Aug 31, according to official documents.
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The project titled 'Genomic Profiling and Identification of Targetable Shared Immunopathogenic Events in Multiplex Families with Autoimmune Diseases' has been awarded to Dr Dipyaman Ganguly of Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana, and Dr Ranjan Gupta, Additional Professor in the Department of Rheumatology, AIIMS, Delhi.
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The 60-day Tobacco-Free Youth campaign was launched at the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Medical Sciences and Dr RML Hospital here, a health ministry statement said.
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The acquisition was undertaken by Fortis’ wholly-owned subsidiary International Hospital Limited (IHL) with the transaction being completed on October 28.
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The reply, dated Oct 26, said National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) notified in 2009 continue to apply across the country while a revised report from IIT Kanpur remains under review by a steering committee which was constituted by CPCB on May 6, 2020.
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Karlo Campana is usually outnumbered these days. He has three young kids under age 4. On a recent Saturday, he played a mini game of basketball with his two older kids in their Southern California home, shooting a ball into a hoop on the door, while his baby boy watched from his bouncy chair.
Campana took paid time off in May after the birth of his son — just as he did for his daughters.
“You need that adjustment period,” he said. Campana, who works at an ad agency, said having the time off not to think about work — or worry about losing income during that time — was crucial for him and his family during a sleep-deprived period.
“My wife isn’t doing it on her own,” he said. “She doesn’t feel like she’s alone on this journey. She feels like she has support.” He jokes that by kid No. 3 he thought he had nailed diaper changes without getting peed on — but he was wrong.
“The benefits are I get to spend time with each of them when they were in the infant stage, the baby stage, and I get to hold them and, you know, change the poopy diapers,” he said. “ It’s like the funny moments of, like, being a parent, like, ‘This is it right here, you’re in the thick of it.’”
Campana is among a growing number of fathers who take leave to bond with a new child in states that offer paid family leave programs — and are part of a larger cultural shift that has seen dads handling more caregiving duties. In California — as in several other states — men make up about half of bonding claim applications. Last year, men even surpassed women — as in Colorado and Washington — for the first time in the state’s history. This trend comes at a time when the federal government has said it wants Americans to have more babies, and families report affordability is an obstacle to raising them.
No federal law guarantees paid parental leave, but California is one of 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., that have passed legislation to enact paid family leave programs — and in many of those places, more dads are opting in.
“We’re in a very different place in terms of our understanding of gender roles, of paternity leave, of dads’ roles than we were 20-plus years ago,” said Molly Weston Williamson, policy director at Paid Leave for All, an organization that advocates for paid family leave policies.
California’s program offers, within a year, up to eight weeks of paid bonding leave for parents after a birth or adoption. That’s on top of six to eight weeks of paid disability leave that moms get to recover after birth.
Research has shown that paternity leave confers benefits beyond allowing a father extra time to bond with a new child: It has positive effects on the whole family, including better health outcomes for both parents. Paid parental leave has also been linked to lower odds of postpartum depression and a decrease in infant mortality rates.
In California, men accounted for 51% of bonding claims filed in 2025. It’s a massive shift from when the state program started in 2004, and men made up about 18% of claim applications.
States fund paid family and medical leave with different combinations of employer and employee contributions; California is among six states where family leave is entirely funded by employee payroll deductions.
In addition to changing gender norms, Weston Williamson said, other factors likely contribute to the increase in claims by men in the state: greater awareness about the program and recent changes to the benefit.
In 2025, the state boosted the amount of income a worker can recoup while on family leave. Now, in California and other states, the leave benefit can be as high as 90% of their regular salary.
“That makes it a realistic option for a lot more families, and I think we’re seeing dads and moms responding to that change,” Weston Williamson said. Still, she said, there’s a lot the new data about dads isn’t telling us.
“We’re getting one particular vantage point into this data, which is useful and valuable, but it’s only telling us sort of part of the story, and we’d need other kinds of information to better understand the full picture,” Weston Williamson said. “Is it that more dads are working and therefore are potentially eligible for these benefits? Is it that women are deciding not to take leave?”
While private employers can offer their own paid leave as a benefit, this data reflects only people who took leave through the state.
A spokesperson for the California Employment Development Department, which administers the state family leave program, said the department couldn’t provide definitive reasons for the increase in bonding claims by men.
One thing is clear: The growth in these states comes as more parents are feeling strained economically. President Donald Trump has said, “We want more babies,” and has promoted policy initiatives like expanding access to in vitro fertilization and offering investment accounts for newborns.
“People really are very worried about the affordability of kids,” said Jeremy Pope, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University.
In 2025, 7 in 10 Americans said raising children had become unaffordable, according to the American Family Survey out of Brigham Young University. It was the biggest single-year jump since the survey started more than a decade ago.
“I don’t think they want government involved in the decision to have kids,” Pope said. “But they worry a lot about how much it costs and they would like to see ways of making those costs smaller or getting help with those costs.”
The Pew Research Center found in a recent survey that among full-time working parents who are not self-employed, 84% said paid parental, family, or medical leave would be “extremely or very helpful” to them, but only half said it was available to them.
Dad-of-three Campana said he initially wasn’t sure if he should take paternity leave because of lingering gender stereotypes.
“ I felt guilty, for sure,” Campana said. “ I think dads maybe feel they need to be the provider. They need to be the ones that are only helping their family by bringing money or working.”
Campana said that when he was growing up, his father worked three jobs. “It was hard for him to be present, and I think that’s the one thing now — it’s like, ‘No, be present. Be there for your kids.’”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
The proposed transaction is likely to value CX Partners-owned Sabine at ₹1,200-1,300 crore, said the people. CX Partners had acquired about 54% stake in Sabine in 2024 at a valuation of $100 million (about ₹835 crore).
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