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Roughly 20,000 nurses citywide are preparing to go on strike if their private hospital employers don’t agree to new labor contracts before the end of this year, setting the stage for a large-scale work stoppage across New York City’s major health systems. Approximately 97% of union members at 12 private hospitals voted to authorize a strike if they do not reach a deal with their employers by Dec. 31, when the current labor contracts expire, the New York State Nurses Association said Monday. (D'Ambrosio, 12/22)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: It’s The ‘Gold Standard’ In Autism Care. Why Are States Reining It In?
Aubreigh Osborne has a new best friend. Dressed in blue with a big ribbon in her blond curls, the 3-year-old sat in her mother’s lap carefully enunciating a classmate’s first name after hearing the words “best friend.” Just months ago, Gaile Osborne didn’t expect her adoptive daughter would make friends at school. Diagnosed with autism at 14 months, Aubreigh Osborne started this year struggling to control outbursts and sometimes hurting herself. Her trouble with social interactions made her family reluctant to go out in public. (Sable-Smith and Jones, 12/23)

Over the past five years, the attorney general’s office, with Aaron Frey at the helm, has secured for Maine more than $260 million in settlements with major pharmaceutical companies accused of “supercharging” the opioid epidemic. It has overseen the settlements’ distribution and contributed to efforts to help a state council and local governments spend their shares deliberately and transparently. (Bader, 12/22)

Inside a storage room at the Clark County Health Department are boxes with taped-on signs reading, “DO NOT USE.” They contain cookers and sterile water that people use to shoot up drugs. The supplies, which came from the state and were paid for with federal money, were for a program where drug users exchange dirty needles for clean ones, part of a strategy known as harm reduction. But under a July executive order from President Donald Trump, federal substance abuse grants can’t pay for supplies such as cookers and tourniquets that it says “only facilitate illegal drug use.” Needles already couldn’t be purchased with federal money. (Ungar, 12/22)

After an autumn of angst over the impending expiration at the end of the month of Porter County’s ambulance contract with Northwest Health, the county and hospital have come to a two-year agreement at an annual cost of $1.5 million for a minimum of four advanced life support and one basic life support ambulances. It’s a considerable, but expected, increase from the yearly ambulance subsidy of $450,000 the county currently pays. (Jones, 12/22)

A panel of Montana state medical board members on Friday voted unanimously to revoke the medical license of Dr. Thomas Weiner, the former Helena cancer doctor who has been accused of prescribing unnecessary treatments and harming patients. On Friday, four members of the board’s adjudication panel accepted the findings of board investigators that Weiner “violated” rules of professional conduct and prohibited him from practicing medicine in Montana ever again. (Silvers, 12/22)

Regarding health care costs —

A greater share of Americans than previously suggested experience burdensome healthcare costs, according to results from a nationally representative cohort study. Among more than 12,600 survey participants, 6.5% said they experienced cost burdens and 3.5% said they experienced catastrophic cost burdens in year 1. (Firth, 12/22)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Medical Bills Can Be Vexing And Perplexing. Here’s This Year’s Best Advice For Patients
A Texas boy’s second dose of the MMRV vaccine cost over $1,400. A Pennsylvania woman’s long-acting birth control cost more than $14,000. Treatment for a Florida Medicaid enrollee’s heart attack cost nearly $78,000 — about as much as surgery for an uninsured Montana woman’s broken arm. In 2025, these patients were among the hundreds who asked �鶹Ů�� Health News to investigate their medical bills as part of its “Bill of the Month” series. (Huetteman, 12/23)