Author: Evan O'Connor

Awareness, Health, Healthcare Reform, Specialty Drugs
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Transgender Awareness Week & Remembrance Day

Transgender Awareness Week falls between November 13-19 every year and is meant to help raise visibility of a vulnerable and underserved community.  ‘Transgender’ is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity is different from the sex assigned at birth; ‘gender identity’ is one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.   Transgender/gender non-conforming people experience gender dysphoria, a clinically significant distress recognized by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) caused by a person’s assigned birth gender differing from the one with which they identify. This leads to […]

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Affordable Care Act, Healthcare Reform
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Open Enrollment for Healthcare Coverage

The Affordable Care Act (ACA; aka Obamacare) Health Insurance Marketplace begins its seventh Open Enrollment period today. American healthcare consumers can sign up on the federal insurance exchange at healthcare.gov or through their state marketplaces. In recent years there has been increased confusion surrounding Open Enrollment due to changes (and attempted changes) made to the ACA under the Trump administration, leading to the U.S. uninsured rate to rise for the first time since 2014 and the largest single-year increase since 2008.   When Obama was president and launched the ACA, Open Enrollment period ran 90 days beginning November 1 and […]

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Awareness
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Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2019

For more than 30 years, October has been National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the U.S. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women, second only to skin cancer. With more than 240,000 women diagnosed each year, awareness can save lives through early detection and lowering risk.   The main risk factors of breast cancer include being a woman and being older, which means almost any woman can be diagnosed with no family history or other known risk factors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends healthy living habits such as maintaining a healthy weight, regular […]

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Awareness, BeMedWise
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Talk About Your Medicines Month

October marks the BeMedWise Program at NeedyMeds’ 34th Talk About Your Medicines Month (TAYMM). This is an annual opportunity to focus attention on the value that enhanced provider-patient communication about medicines can play in promoting safe and appropriate medicine use and improved health outcomes. Communication is a two-way street: consumers benefit from being proactive in asking questions and seeking information about their medicines, and healthcare providers in turn must be able to share medical information in a meaningful way that their patients are able to understand and act on.   This year’s theme for TAYMM is Preventing Opioid Misuse and Abuse […]

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Awareness, Mental Health
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World Mental Health Day

For over 25 years, the first full week of October has been Mental Illness Awareness Week. World Mental Health Day falls on October 10. This year, our blog has observed Mental Health Month in May, Minority Mental Health Month in July, and Suicide Prevention Month/Week/Day in September. We continue to discuss mental health because it is crucial to public health.   Twenty percent of the population — as many as 65.9 million Americans — live with some kind of mental health condition, with nearly 5% living with a serious mental illness that substantially limits their life activities. Those living with […]

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About Us

Welcome to the NeedyMeds Voice! We look forward to presenting you with timely, provocative pieces on healthcare reform, patient advocacy, medication and healthcare access, and other health-related news. Our goals are to educate, enlighten, and elucidate; together, we will try to make sense of the myriad and ongoing healthcare-related changes in the U.S. today.