Authored by: Sophie Rinzler Art by: Grace Liu Health policy discourse in the United States has long centered on insurance expansion as the primary mechanism for improving access to care. From the Affordable Care Act to Medicaid expansion initiatives, coverage rates are often treated as the central metric of progress. Yet obtaining insurance does not automatically translate into meaningful access. A growing body of evidence suggests that health insurance literacy – the ability

Authored by: Sophie Erb-Watson Art by: Ava Shi One of the most durable legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic is the acceleration of healthcare workforce burnout and attrition. While many pandemic-era reforms targeted access or delivery modalities, the collapse of workforce stability has emerged as a pressing structural threat. In the United States, burnout, early retirement, and declining labor force participation among healthcare workers surged during and after the pandemic, wor

Authored by: Sophie Elijovich Art by: Jane Wang “I was told that I was experiencing psychosomatic pain stemming from guilt for sinning with boys,” [1]. Those were the words of Melanie, a woman who spent ten years in excruciating pain before finally being diagnosed with endometriosis that her new surgeon “said was one of the worst cases of endometriosis in a young person she had ever seen” [1]. Another victim, Truzane, who was eventually diagnosed with microvascular heart dise