Patients who are fed up with the bureaucracy of the health insurance industry are ditching the copays and high deductibles for a different way to get primary care.

One such patient is self-employed attorney Dan Hobart, who struggled to find insurance because of his pre-existing conditions. Even after Affordable Care Act went into effect, doctor visits were still too costly for him to get the care he needed.

Need a laugh?

Schedule your appointment with levity, courtesy of a slew of stand-up comics and other comedy attractions scheduled to thump funny bones in the coming weeks and months in Kansas City.

Unless maybe you don’t need a laugh. Ha – that’s a good one!

The pain might start after bumping an elbow on a kitchen counter. Or maybe the incident was more minor than that, and went completely unnoticed. But for some people, what begins as "nothing" converts to searing pain over part or all of the body.

"If you sprain your ankle, the nerves should turn off after a while once that's healed, that pain signaling should die down. But if you have a chronic pain syndrome, the nerves don't get the memo to turn off," says Cara Hoffart, a rheumatologist at Children's Mercy Hospital.

Kansas City is now the 31st largest metro area in the United States, dropping from 30th in 2017. New estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau indicate the Austin, Texas, metro area surpassed Kansas City in 2018.

Buoyed by the biggest gift in its history, $10 million from the Sunderland Foundation, Truman Medical Centers on Thursday launched an ambitious campaign to raise nearly $19 million to upgrade its neonatal intensive care unit.

The push to modernize and expand Truman's NICU has locked in pledges of $14 million, according to hospital officials. That includes additional commitments of $2.5 million from the Hall Family Foundation and other contributors such as Waddell and Reed CEO Phil Sanders, the president of Truman’s board. 

Many Kansas families may not be following safe sleep practices meant to cut down the risk that infants could die in their sleep.

The first survey of its kind in the state found four in five new mothers said their babies sleep primarily on their backs.

Rachel Sisson, the director of the Bureau of Family Health at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, wants to make it five out of five.

A small city in Kansas is determined to prove The Onion wrong.

Folks in Emporia, Kansas, weren’t laughing when the satirical paper named it “best town to escape from” in 2017. In fact, the “brain drain” from rural areas has been a problem across the country for decades. Since 2000, Emporia's population has declined more than 7 percent. It's now home to 24,724 people.

When Kansas-born actress and dancer Louise Brooks wanted to travel to New York City in 1922 at the age of 15, she could not go alone. She needed a chaperone.

Brooks' five-week trip is the basis of Lawrence novelist Laura Moriarty's 2012 book "The Chaperone," which has now been made into a movie of the same name. Moriarty was at the New York City premiere on March 25 and says it was exhilarating.

The families of several people who were killed or wounded in a 2016 mass shooting near Wichita, Kansas, have reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the pawn store that sold some of the guns used in the attack.

The lawsuit alleged that local retailer A Pawn Shop sold the guns to a woman as part of a straw purchase, which is when one person buys a gun on behalf of someone else, circumventing background checks and federal law.