�鶹Ů��

Late one night, while riding along with a police officer on patrol, the mayor of Fishers, Ind., asked the officer what kinds of calls most concerned him. He got an unexpected answer: mental health situations. They were occurring almost once a shift. Mental illness isn’t readily visible in a place like Fishers, an affluent suburb of Indianapolis with just under 90,000 residents. “In our community,” Mayor Scott Fadness says, “there are a lot of people living in quiet despair and suffering from mental health issues, but they’re not being addressed in a systemic way.” (Mike Maciag, 5/2016)

Is home birth safe? That depends on where you ask the question. In much of the developed world, home birth is a fringe practice, at about 2 percent of births or less, for obvious reasons: Childbirth is inherently dangerous, and if an emergency occurs, the baby or even the mother may die. Indeed, in the United States, the switch from home birth to hospital birth over the 20th century was accompanied by a more than 90 percent decrease in neonatal mortality and nearly 99 percent decrease in maternal mortality. Antibiotics, blood banking, safe C-sections and neonatology have combined to change death in childbirth from common to rare. (Amy Tuteur, 4/30)

Among the most hotly debated of the issues Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have taken on in the Democratic primary contest is how best to get to universal health insurance coverage. The former secretary of state favors incremental steps, and the senator calls for a single-payer system. That debate, and their focus on universal coverage as their goal, appears to have had a modest and perhaps surprising effect on attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. The health-care law is issue about which public attitudes seldom shift, yet the share of Democrats who want to expand the Affordable Care Act rose over the past year. (Drew Altman, 5/1)

On April 1, Iowa officially adopted a new framework to manage and deliver the state’s Medicaid benefits. The new program, IA Health Link, serves more than 560,000 low-income and disabled Iowans through three managed care organizations. (Kimberly Foltz, 4/29)

Sunday marks a bright day in the struggle to provide health insurance for every child in California. It's the day all children, regardless of immigration status, will have access to checkups and other basic preventive care as part of the state's Medi-Cal expansion signed into law last year by Gov. Jerry Brown. The dark cloud looming on the horizon is the state's failure to offer adequate compensation for doctors treating millions of low-income patients. It's meaningless to give insurance to the needy if there aren't enough doctors willing to accept them as patients. Even before this, many Medi-Cal patients have had to resort to the emergency room because they couldn't find a doctor to see them. (5/30)

The number of irresponsible parents in the Des Moines area increased this school year. In Polk County, they sought and obtained religious exemptions allowing 821 students to escape mandatory school vaccinations, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year. (5/1)

A thistle to some elected officials in Iowa who have an unhealthy obsession with the reproduction of their female constituents. Their fixation doesn’t end with the desire to outlaw abortion and force every pregnant woman to bear a child. They also want to prevent young women from obtaining information about how to avoid getting pregnant in the first place. Lawmakers relentlessly pushed this legislative session for a change in state law to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving public dollars for family planning services. (5/1)

Imagine, for a moment, that another country attacked the United States and killed 40,000 Americans. Now imagine that such an attack struck the U.S. every single year. That's the crisis we face right now — except it's not another country that's responsible for this death toll. It's suicide. More than 40,000 Americans take their own lives each year. That's roughly one every 13 minutes. (Andrew Romanoff, 4/30)

Here’s some news we never tire of reporting: The teen pregnancy rate continues to decline across the country, including in North Carolina. New numbers last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that birth rates for females ages 15-19 have declined 38.5 percent nationwide from 2006-07 to 2013-14. The drop is even more stark for black teens (40.3 percent) and Hispanic teens (47.8 percent.) (5/1)