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Mail delivery slowdowns could leave people with asthma, diabetes and other chronic illnesses without needed medications, particularly in rural areas, a new report from the Brookings Institution concludes. (Goldman, 12/9)

Connecticut officials have crafted a five-year, billion-dollar strategy to improve the health of the state’s rural residents. Last month, the Department of Social Services requested roughly $938 million from the federal government for the effort. The funding would come from the Rural Health Transformation Program — created as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or H.R. 1, that President Donald Trump signed into law in July. (Golvala, 12/9)

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News: Rural Health Providers Could Be Collateral Damage From $100K Trump Visa Fee

Bekki Holzkamm has been trying to hire a lab technician at a hospital in rural North Dakota since late summer. Not one U.S. citizen has applied. West River Health Services in Hettinger, a town of about 1,000 residents in the southwestern part of the state, has four options, and none is good. The hospital could fork over $100,000 for the Trump administration’s new H-1B visa fee and hire one of the more than 30 applicants from the Philippines or Nigeria. The fee is the equivalent of what some rural hospitals would pay two lab techs in a year, said Holzkamm, who is West River’s lab manager. (Zionts and Reese, 12/9)

A new hospital at UC Irvine opens Wednesday and it will be all-electric — only the second such medical center, and the largest, in the country so far. People live through some of the toughest moments of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals traditionally connect with natural gas lines several times bigger than those connected to residential homes, to ensure that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have sufficient hot water. (Lobet, 12/8)

Federal regulators are stepping into a fight between insurers and state commissioners over Medicare Advantage marketing practices. Insurers in recent years have sought to limit potentially costly Medicare Advantage enrollment by reducing or ending commissions to brokers and third-party marketers and narrowing access to online portals. In response, roughly a dozen state commissioners have urged insurers to reverse such actions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told states Friday that regulation of Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D plans should ultimately rest at the federal level. (Tong, 12/8)

On her son’s 14th birthday, a few days before Thanksgiving, Nikki got a call from his pediatrician at Sutter Health: In December, the doctor said, Sutter would stop providing all gender-affirming care for transgender children and teens like hers. Sutter, along with major Bay Area providers Kaiser Permanente and Stanford, had already stopped offering gender-affirming surgeries for young patients. But Sutter’s new ban would also apply to puberty blockers and hormone therapy for patients under 19. (Allday, 12/8)

Medical student Tyler Harvey was planning to take the high-stakes Step 1 exam in about a week. It’s the first and perhaps most difficult hurdle on the way to becoming a doctor. But after taking a practice exam, their score wasn’t where they wanted it to be. Something inside them shifted. (Gaffney, 12/9)