(Oona Tempest/KFF Health News)

Nothing melts our hearts admire a health protection valentine. Readers made us swoon this season, writing poetic traces about prescription drug pricing, medical debt, essential care shortages, and extra.

Listed below are a pair of of our favorites, starting up with the broad prize winner and first runner-up, whose entries had been every became into a caricature by workers illustrator Oona Tempest.

Health News tamfitronics 1st Pickle

Health News tamfitronics A colourful caricature drawing presentations a hand maintaining a postcard. The postcard image is of a banner reading “LOW-COST LAND” and being held by two cherry-crimson Cupids. Under the Cupids are prescription bottles and a looking out ranking embellished with hearts. Gold cash with wings beautify the background. Two U.S. passports are viewed tucked in the encourage of the postcard. A speech bubble coming from the actual person maintaining the card and passports reads, “Darling, this Valentine’s Day / let’s take hang of our passports / and fly away to someplace, / where the same pills price a allotment / of what they attain in the States.”
(Illustration: Oona Tempest/KFF Health News; poem: Jennifer Reck)

Darling, this Valentine’s Day,
let’s take hang of our passports
and fly away to someplace,
where the same pills price a allotment
of what they attain in the States.

— Jennifer Reck

Health News tamfitronics Runner-Up

Health News tamfitronics A four-panel, dusky and white droll. The first panel reads, “I saw the doctor for a compare, I had a lump in my appropriate breast,” and presentations a girl standing nervously beside her doctor. The 2d panel reads, “Two weeks for the answer,” and presentations the same girl sitting at a computer, nervously clicking a refresh button on her e mail, which reads, “NO NEW MAIL.” The third panel reads, “It wasn’t most cancers,” and presentations the girl triumphantly maintaining up her cell phone with the test consequence while crying tears of joy. The fourth and final panel reads, “So in its put of loss of life, I’m in debt,” and presentations her maintaining a medical invoice in her fingers, which tremble as she reads from it, “Your BIG BILL.”
(Illustration: Oona Tempest/KFF Health News; poem: Sunshine Moore Anger)

I saw the doctor for a compare,
I had a lump in my appropriate breast.
Two weeks for the answer.
It wasn’t most cancers.
So in its put of loss of life, I’m in debt.

— Sunshine Moore Anger

Other Newsroom Favorites

I became lost in the disappointment
and shock of you leaving,
Tore my eyes away
from my Morning Briefing

How would possibly perhaps well perhaps you dash away us,
Why would you stray?
Whereas you happen to are loved so dearly by the ACA?
But I spotted too late,
’Twas no longer to be,
My essential care now no longer loved me

– Zac Aulson

Parental esteem is agreeable
And wager what makes it stronger
A paid parental dash away protection
To follow exiguous one longer

– Andrea Ferguson

The types flirts with my affections,
A dance of denials, chunky of rejections.
My heart yearns for you, my candy remedy, nonetheless insurance protection insists on prior authorization.

– Sally Nix

My esteem for you, darling, is blinding
Esteem a clinical trial pre-findings
But I alarm we can piece
And I’ll lose my heart
Thanks to Medicaid unwinding!

– Kara Gavin