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Mayor Adam O’Neal wants his hospital back. He was born in Pungo District Hospital in the sleepy town of Belhaven, N.C. Decades later, as mayor of Belhaven, he counted on the hospital to provide not just health care, but scores of jobs. In his rural stretch of coastal North Carolina — beautiful but isolated, with a painfully high poverty rate — he saw Pungo as the “heartbeat” of the community. That is, until the hospital was shut down on July 1, 2014, less than three years after a much larger health system had purchased it. (Blau, 12/21)

States have struggled with how to give out potentially lucrative medical marijuana licenses — trying to balance public health concerns against an entrepreneurial spirit and avoid a bevy of lawsuits. Many want to ensure the businesses are well run and are supplying quality products. But even in states like Arizona where dispensaries are required to be nonprofits, competition for licenses can lead to a gold rush mentality and lawsuits as entrepreneurs eye a medical marijuana industry with $4.2 billion in sales in 2014. (Beitsch, 12/22)

Almost 400,000 current and former members of the Community Health Plan of Washington have had personal information, including Social Security numbers, exposed in a data breach. The nonprofit, which provides health insurance through Medicaid in Washington, is sending letters to 381,534 individuals Wednesday notifying them of the invasion and steps they can take to protect themselves with help from Community Health Plan of Washington. There’s no evidence yet of any harm to members, said Marilee McGuire, its chief operating officer. The organization confirmed the breach Nov. 30 after a forensics investigation and notified the FBI and state regulators, including the Office of the Insurance Commissioner, McGuire said. (Young, 12/21)

San Francisco-based Dignity Health has begun negotiations with an academic medical center in the Bay Area, even as it proceeds with merger talks with Catholic Health Initiatives. During a call with analysts about its latest financial results, Dignity Chief Financial Officer Daniel Morissette said the system is pursuing a possible joint venture with an as-yet unnamed academic medical center because it would benefit Dignity's four hospitals in the Bay Area by having a teaching hospital behind them. Morissette cautioned that talks were very preliminary and confidentiality provisions in a nonbinding letter-of-intent prohibited him from naming the prospect. (Barkholz, 12/21)

Missouri will be one of eight states participating in a pilot program expanding access to mental health services in community health clinics. It’s the next step in the Excellence in Mental Health Act introduced by Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and signed by President Obama in 2014. Blunt on Wednesday said that one in four Americans suffer mental health problems but only a fraction get care. The designation of Missouri and the seven other states “will help bridge that gap by expanding and improving access to quality mental and behavioral health care,” he said. (Raasch, 12/21)

About a dozen of Missouri’s mental health clinics will receive an infusion of federal money in 2017, after the state was one of eight selected to be part of a national demonstration project. The clinics will be required to collect and report quality data and meet a set of criteria, which will determine how much funding they receive. (Bouscaren, 12/22)

Four Twin Cities chiropractors fraudulently billed auto insurance companies for millions of dollars through “nearly identical” but independent conspiracies, according to four indictments unsealed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Minneapolis. The four chiropractors plus 15 patient recruiters were indicted on charges of conspiring to commit health care fraud between 2010 and 2015, according to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger. Two other chiropractors were implicated as well. (Cooney, 12/21)

Eversource Energy will remove 14,440 retirees from its health care plan in the New Year and will instead offer to reimburse them for buying private insurance, a switch being made by a growing number of big companies to curb costs. The electricity and natural gas company, the largest in New England, said the move will save $30 million a year in health costs and will benefit its retirees by offering a greater choice of plans through a new private insurance exchange. (Vaccaro and Johnston, 12/22)

The state has removed the director of Virginia’s only behavioral health hospital for children and adolescents. Dr. Jeffrey Aaron no longer is in charge of the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents in Staunton, said Meghan McGuire, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. (Martz and Kleiner, 12/21)

Each Wednesday at St. Francis Episcopal Church on the north side of San Antonio, dozens of refugees from all over the world come for free care at the Refugee Health Clinic. Students and faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio have teamed up to operate one of the only student-run refugee clinics in the country. (Rigby, 12/21)

Two social workers allege they were fired from a suburban nursing home after refusing to fabricate medical records related to incidents of patient abuse, according to their pending lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court. Some of their patient-abuse allegations were investigated separately by the Illinois Department of Public Health, which cited the facility for safety breaches, government records show. Once called Burnham Healthcare but now known as Bria of River Oaks, the 309-bed home serves geriatric and bed-bound patients alongside younger adults with mental illness, substance abusers and convicted felons. (Jackson and Marx, 12/22)

The cost of charity care provided by the University of Pennsylvania Health System more than doubled in fiscal year 2016, which ended June 30. But that was not because of a new approach at the Philadelphia region's largest system.  Penn Medicine acquired Lancaster General Health on Aug. 1, 2015. That system provided slightly more than $8 million worth of charity care in fiscal 2016, half of the Penn health system's $16.3 million total, even though it accounted for just $912.3 million of Penn's $5.3 billion in net patient revenue. In fiscal 2015, Penn reported $7 million in charity-care costs, according to its audited financial statement. (Brubaker, 12/21)

Riverside County plans to connect former inmates with health clinics and social services. Orange County hopes to get homeless residents into housing — and help them stay there. Placer County is opening a respite center where homeless patients can go after they leave the hospital. Those are just some of the pilot projects in a $3 billion experimental effort officials hope will improve the health of California’s most vulnerable populations. The effort is a recognition that improving people’s health will take more than just getting them insured. (Gorman, 12/22)