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Oregon has become the fourth state to enact a law requiring nurse-to-patient ratios at hospitals, a move praised by labor groups and panned by health systems. Hospitals in the state will have until Sept. 1 to comply with certified nursing assistant ratios set by the bill signed Tuesday by Gov. Tina Kotek (D). Beginning in June 2025, the Oregon Health Authority will start enforcing other minimum nurse staffing requirements that vary by type of unit and patient acuity and take effect next year. (Devereaux, 8/17)

A judge said Thursday he will temporarily block Alabama from issuing licenses to grow and distribute medical marijuana as he reviews an allegation that the state commission illegally deliberated in secret before selecting winners. (8/17)

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent four years trying to overhaul how counties pay for mental health care, betting his reputation on making a dent on homelessness, substance abuse and mental health problems. Now, he is making concessions amid concerns he’s going too far, POLITICO has learned. (Bluth, 8/16)

Thousands of North Carolinians struggle under debt accumulated because they went to their local hospital for care and wound up with bills that were beyond their ability to pay. Even some people with insurance were overloaded with medical debt after seeking care. Those are the topline findings of a study released Wednesday morning that was conducted by researchers from North Carolina Treasurer Dale Folwell’s office and the Duke University School of Law. (Hoban, 8/18)

New Jersey can sue the gun industry under a “public nuisance” law, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, handing a major victory to the state after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision loosening public carrying restrictions. (Racioppi, 8/17)

The death of a soldier and the hospitalization of another last week at Camp Shelby, an Army base in Mississippi, may have been caused by a combination of hot weather and the service's fitness test, as record-breaking heat waves torch much of the U.S. (Beynon, 8/17)

In early 2019, a small group of foster parents clustered in the governor’s office, hoping months of working with the state would improve things for children like theirs: deaf or hard of hearing and traumatized by a system that struggled to care for them. (Bohra, 8/18)

Law officers, county commissioners and addiction specialists who gathered in southwestern Colorado this week to figure out how to pull the state out of the fentanyl crisis agreed on this: Big money from opioid settlements is making a dent in their ability to offer services. (Brown, 8/18)

A growing number of Midwestern cities are declaring themselves safe havens for gender-affirming health care, often in direct defiance of laws passed by conservatives at the state level. While state legislatures across the Midwest are controlled overwhelmingly by Republicans, cities and metropolitan areas tend to lean more Democratic, driving some local leaders to introduce resolutions that distinguish the policy priorities of liberal communities from those of the conservative states in which they are located. (Migdon, 8/18)

Jamie Gonzales, a former program coordinator at the University of Houston’s LGBTQ Resource Center, hasn’t slept well ever since she heard that the center will be disbanded in accordance with Senate Bill 17, a law banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at public higher education institutions. Although she knew the closure was coming after the bill passed in April in the Texas Senate, she still found herself emotionally ill-prepared to grapple with the reality: an end of an era for a place that served as a beacon of acceptance, safety and support for thousands of queer “Coogs,” as UH students often call themselves. (Welch, 8/17)

The future of transgender women’s participation in high-level women’s chess competitions seems uncertain, after the International Chess Federation introduced new regulations effectively barring many from women’s events for up to two years or more. ... The regulations state that if the gender of a player “was changed from a male to a female” on their FIDE identification, the “player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women” until a further decision is made. (Moses and McCarthy, 8/17)