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In Illinois, 1 in 4 residents get their health care through Medicaid. Illinois offers free health care to people with low or no income. This sounds fantastic — until you need a doctor or a prescription. Why? Not every doctor, hospital, nursing home or pharmacy accepts Illinois Medicaid. Many providers avoid Medicaid like the plague. It’s not personal; it’s math. Illinois Medicaid pays less than all of its neighboring states do, in some cases significantly less. Would you work for a noticeably smaller paycheck? (Maria Gross Pollock, 1/13)

When H5N1 avian flu was detected in commercial raw milk samples from a dairy called Raw Farm in California in December, the company released a press statement: “There are no illnesses associated with H5N1 in our products, but rather this is a political issue." To critics of raw milk — and of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., potential Health and Human Services secretary and evangelist of the beverage — the discovery of H5N1 was a sign that it should be banned. But perhaps the discovery means that the checks in our public health systems are working. (Bianca Garcia, 1/14)

For supply chains, natural and manmade disruptive events act like a domino effect, impacting an organization’s operations, bottom line, and the delivery of products and services our economy depends on. Remember toilet paper in March 2020? For the health care sector, the consequences of this disruption are far more dire than having to check a few stores for toilet paper. Tariffs, supply shortages, global logistics delays, natural disasters, and political unrest can have an overwhelming impact on patient care and the availability of medical products that providers rely on every day. (Soumi Saha and Mark Hendrickson, 1/14)

Researchers have long known that excessive alcohol use is hazardous to one’s health. In the United States, alcohol-associated liver disease is the top reason people need liver transplants. Heavy alcohol use has been linked to high blood pressure, strokes, heart failure and multiple cancers. The surgeon general’s advisory notes that 20,000 cancer deaths annually are related to alcohol consumption. (Leana S. Wen, 1/14)

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent advisory that drinking alcohol raises the risk of cancer is something of a gamble. It’s a bet that telling people to do less of something they enjoy will be taken in good faith, and not as a politically motivated judgment of their lifestyle choices. It also exemplifies some perennial challenges in public health. (Rachael Bedard, 1/13)