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A federal government analysis that said Arizona's health insurance co-op had gotten just a fraction of its projected enrollment last year missed thousands of signups and incorrectly showed the state nonprofit set up under the Affordable Care Act signed up only 4 percent of the people it expected in 2014. (8/21)

Gov. Wolf announced Thursday a series of small benefit upgrades for families with coverage though the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), effective Dec. 1. Changes include removal of limits on inpatient and outpatient stays for mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, and the end of outpatient co-payments for mental-health services. Vision care was broadened to cover more types of prescription lenses and tinting. CHIP has long been considered excellent insurance, and many of the changes will apply to small portions of the 148,000 children in the program. For example, few would normally exceed the current limit of 50 outpatient visits a year, which will be removed. But some with chronic conditions had maxed out, said Colleen McCauley, health policy director for the nonprofit Public Citizens for Children and Youth. (Sapatkin, 8/21)

Washington State Patrol Sgt. Mark Crandall half-jokingly says he can tell a driver is under the influence of marijuana during a traffic stop when the motorist becomes overly familiar and is calling him “dude.” The truth in the joke, Crandall says, is that attitude and speech patterns can be effective markers for drugged driving. And, according to legalization advocates and some in law enforcement, they can be more reliable than blood tests that measure THC—the psychoactive compound in marijuana. (Breitenbach, 8/21)

Taking action on dozens of bills, Gov. Bruce Rauner signed measures into law that would allow nursing home residents to put cameras in their rooms to protect against abuse and require high school students to take a civics class in order to graduate. The Republican governor also made liberal use of his veto pen, rejecting proposals that would extend key services to wards of the state until they were 21 instead of 18, and require doctors to provide hepatitis C screenings for people born from 1945 to 1965. (Garcia and Geiger, 8/21)

A new study from Johns Hopkins University shows Florida’s pill mill crackdown worked in its first year. After becoming the epicenter for prescription opioid abuse, the state passed tougher laws for pain management clinics. The state also implemented a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program which gave healthcare professionals a better look at patients’ prescription drug histories.The laws went into full affect in 2011. Researchers at Johns Hopkins looked at hundreds of millions of prescriptions from the year before and after. Lainie Rutkow was lead author on the study and says the first year of data shows a promising drop. (8/21)

Remote doctor appointments could be coming soon to the school nurse’s office. Starting Sept. 1, a new law will allow physicians to get paid for seeing children over a sophisticated form of video chat, as long as the student is at school and enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program for the poor and disabled. The law’s supporters say it could lead more schools around the state to set up nurse's offices equipped to handle remote doctor visits — and save parents time and money. (Rocha, Dehn and Walters, 8/23)

As of Sept. 1, a new state law will guarantee that all public employees — including state and county workers and public school teachers — will be guaranteed “reasonable accommodations” to pump breast milk in the workplace. Those include sufficient break times and a private room, such as a single-person bathroom, where employees can pump. Federal law already requires employers to provide accommodations for hourly employees to pump breast milk while at work, but they don’t have to provide those accommodations for salaried workers. In the last legislative session, Democratic state Rep. Armando Walle of Houston pushed for a state law that would mirror those federal regulations for salaried workers. (Ura and Dehn, 8/22)

Eight months after homelessness hit a record in New York City, you can still see the need of the city's most vulnerable in Tompkins Square Park. ... New York's current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has beefed up funding to help more families find permanent housing and pay for rent, as well as to improve shelter conditions and open new facilities. He recently announced a $22 million mental health program that includes more treatment for mentally ill people living on the streets. (Lo Wang, 8/23)