For decades, thousands of people came to Trinidad, Colorado, to have gender confirmation surgery done by Dr. Stanley Biber. This excerpt from Going To Trinidad tells his—and one of his patient’s—poignant stories.

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

The story of Edward Averill, a blind man with one foot who robbed a bank in Austin, Texas.

The transgender community fights for health care.

A late night host finds a new voice.

A tuberculosis crisis in the rural South.

A tour of a nonprofit that collects, warehouses, and donates perfectly good stuff hospitals throw away, from anesthesia machines to unopened surgical tools.

On the interminable two weeks between a bad sonogram and the end of a pregnancy.

We devote vast resources to intensive, one-off procedures, while starving the kind of steady, intimate care that often helps people more.

A longtime Harper’s contributor considers America as he dies: “When I died, I died of many things: the failing systems; the weakening of age; the exhaustion of the long war against dying. Finally, I succumbed to the lack of ethics in a California hospital, killed by filth and neglect.”

The plight of the uninsured in a red state.

The author gets a crash course in health care pricing after having his urethra fixed.

A social and historical look at a women's sanatorium.

"What about the exercise path keeps the women moving together. They move toward the birds and the birds disperse. A woman drops a handful of raisins from breakfast and the birds converge for the raisins but only until the raisins are gone. The birds will disperse again. They will fly down chimneys and into cars. The shriveled fruits cannot hold their attention for much longer now. They have no exercise path like the women have. The exercise path keeps the women moving together each morning and evening, as if they will never disperse. The women entwine their wet hands."

Ignored early warnings, political pressure, and a botched Obamacare rollout.

How mergers between Catholic institutions and secular hospitals are changing the nature of health care.

What the health care industry can learn from how The Cheesecake Factory does business.

A 7,000-word anatomy of the chaotic 9 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its health care ruling.

The author on his mother’s deteriorating health and the “price of longevity.”

Ina May Gaskin and the battle for at-home births.

Recently discharged, an undocumented immigrant discusses his treatment.

In a city with a large immigrant population, it is not rare for hospitals to have one or more patients who, for reasons unrelated to their medical condition, do not seem to leave. At Downtown, where a bed costs the hospital more than $2,000 a day, there are currently three long-term patients who no longer need acute care but cannot be discharged because they have nowhere to go. The hospital pays nearly all costs for these patients’ treatment. One man left recently after a stay of more than five years.

On the combined force of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, a Tea Party stalwart.

How focusing on the neediest patients could radically reduce health care costs.

How misdirected incentives in the bewildering medical supply industry keep innovative, life-saving equipment from reaching hospitals.