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As physicians, nothing brightens our faces quite like shutting off our computers. We spend almost two hours of every work day wrestling with the long loading times to view clinical data, the litany of structured data sets we must complete to meet medical billing requirements for innumerable insurance companies, and the nearly endless sea of protected health information we must wade through just to find the piece we need for our patients. (Ashten Duncan, Khuzeman Abbasi and Sana Augustine, 12/3)

For good or ill, the Kennedy family has often made their personal medical experiences a basis for health policy. As far back as the 1920s, when future president John F. Kennedy (RFK Jr.'s uncle Jack) fell ill as a toddler with scarlet fever, a then-potentially deadly and incurable bacterial infection, JFK's father, Joe, pulled political strings through his father-in-law, Boston's former mayor John F. Fitzgerald, to get young Jack admitted to a local hospital. Otherwise, the family, which had just welcomed its fourth baby, would have been confined to their house under quarantine. (Barbara A. Perry, 12/3)

Starting in the 1960s, most Illinois water systems were required to add fluoride, or adjust the level if it was already present, resulting in much healthier teeth. To this day, fluoride is required throughout Illinois. Altogether, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s population gets it in their water. Now this public health triumph is under new scrutiny, including from one of the highest-profile Cabinet nominees of the incoming Donald J. Trump administration. (12/2)

Most housing in the United States wasn’t developed with aging in mind. People don’t usually think about wheelchair ramps, walk-in showers, stair railings or grab bars in a home — until they desperately need them. Only an estimated 10 percent of the nation’s housing stock is considered senior friendly. Compounding the challenge, the housing stock is aging and sliding ever further into disrepair. Even minor modifications can be daunting and expensive. Nearly a third of households headed by seniors are cost burdened, meaning more than 30 percent of their income is eaten up by housing costs. That number is growing fast. So is the number of seniors falling into homelessness — a trend expected to continue for decades. (Michelle Cottle, 12/3)

On Wednesday I will present oral argument before the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents. I, along with my colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union and other co-counsel, represent three transgender adolescents, their parents and a Tennessee doctor who is barred from treating her transgender patients under the age of 18 with the hormone therapy she is permitted to prescribe for purposes other than to treat gender dysphoria. In Tennessee, doctors can prescribe puberty-blocking medication and hormone therapy for many medical reasons. Under the Tennessee law that is now being challenged before the Supreme Court, they are barred from doing so to allow an adolescent to identify, live or appear in a way inconsistent with the person’s sex assigned at birth. (Chase Strangio, 12/3)