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Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the teenager convicted of killing four people at a Michigan high school in 2021, took the stand in her manslaughter trial Thursday and testified it was her husband’s responsibility to store their son Ethan’s gun safely. “I didn’t feel comfortable putting the lock thing on it,” she said.... Crumbley testified her son had never asked her to get help for mental health issues, contrary to his private journal writings and texts to a friend. She said he expressed some anxiety about taking tests and what he would do after high school, “but not to a level where I felt he needed to go see a psychiatrist or mental health professional right away.” The prosecution rested its case Thursday. (Levenson and del Valle, 2/1)

"Tongue-in-cheek, I made it AR-15 percent," Mitchell told WKRN. "I call it the ‘Thoughts and Prayers Tax.’ If we’re going to do nothing else in this state, we’re going to put this taxation into a fund to fund K through 12 mental health counselors for our children." "If we don’t solve this problem, we’re going to need a lot more mental health counselors in our schools, either for the school shooting or for the children who go home, and the guns are unsecured at home, and they either shoot themselves or their neighbors’ children. It’s either we act and do something, or we’re going to have to start taxing to pay for the other problem it’s causing," he added. (Hagstrom, 2/1)

State-subsidized MinnesotaCare insurance is currently available only to people under a certain income limit, but some state legislators want to open the program up to anyone. The Minnesota Department of Commerce released a report Thursday laying out the costs for a potential expansion of the state’s public health insurance program. The report says an expansion could cost the state up to $364 million annually and enroll up to 151,000 more people in the program. (Timar-Wilcox, 2/1)

Nearly 12 percent of Houston-area children went without health insurance in 2022, more than double the national average, according to a recent report by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. ... “This is not just a one-city problem that the state is seeing,” said Alec Mendoza, a senior policy associate for health at the advocacy group, Texans Care for Children. “This is something that is widespread across the entire state, no matter the zip code, no matter the demographics, the economics or the geography.” (Severson, 2/1)

As Iowa's nursing homes and hospitals struggle with chronic staffing shortages, lawmakers have advanced a bill that would put additional regulations and oversight on health care agencies that supply temporary medical staff. The bill, which passed a House Health and Human Services subcommittee on Thursday, would require staffing agencies to register with the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, which would oversee new requirements such as a wage cap that limits the amount temporary workers can make. (Krebs, 2/1)

Months before the 2022 baby formula shortage drew congressional attention, operators at the nation’s 211 social service hotlines noticed an uptick in low-income parents pleading for help feeding their infants. A decade earlier, before the mortgage crisis crippled the country’s largest banks, 211 hotlines were jammed with people unable to make house payments. Anyone monitoring the hotlines in more recent months would have seen California’s homeless crisis was spreading to other states, as callers were riven with anxiety over eviction notices. (Bierman and LeMee, 2/1)

On a recent morning, four veterans who served in the 1960s and 1970s gathered at tables at the Jon W. Paulson Veterans Community in a common room that smelled of strong coffee. Eric Hill, an Army veteran with thinning gray hair, spent almost eight years living in his van, often staying the night in the San Francisco Veterans Affairs hospital’s parking lot. “When I was younger, you know, get in the car, travel around the country, with or without anybody, and that was fine,” he says. “But when you’re in your 60s, it’s not as easy. And now I’m 75. I feel very fortunate that I have this place.” (Marshall-Chalmers, 2/1)

The Army is hoping privatization can fix the myriad quality-of-life issues facing its barracks, at least partly because it has few other ideas. In December, key service leaders had a barracks summit to draw up plans to get soldier housing back up to standards following months of media reports on rampant mold and other problems, as well as a damning federal watchdog report detailing squalid conditions in military rank-and-file base housing. (Beynon, 2/1)