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Health insurers nationwide must continue to provide coverage of certain preventive services like cancer screenings and behavioral counseling at no cost, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The decision in the closely watched case largely preserves the Affordable Care Act's free preventive services requirement. (Goldman, 6/21)

A federal appeals court on Friday found unconstitutional a key component of the Affordable Care Act that grants a health task force the effective authority to require that insurers both cover an array of preventive health interventions and screenings and refrain from imposing out-of-pocket costs for them. The lawsuit centered on the objections of a coalition of small businesses in Texas to the requirement that they cover a drug for HIV prevention, known as PrEP, in their employee health plans. (Ryan, 6/21)

We've spent the last nine weeks going through health care's defining topics, but if there's a thread tying them all together it's this: Health care in America is deeply unequal, and it might get worse. All of the innovation in the world won't make any difference to patients if it's unaffordable or inaccessible, and right now everything in the pipeline is headed for a two-tiered system. (Owens, 6/21)

Gilead’s experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday. None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot had contracted HIV by an interim analysis, prompting the independent data monitoring committee to recommend Gilead unblind the Phase 3 trial and offer the treatment to everyone in the study. Other participants had received standard daily pills. (Peebles, 6/20)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Young Gay Latinos See Rising Share Of New HIV Cases, Leading To Call For Targeted Funding

Four months after seeking asylum in the U.S., Fernando Hermida began coughing and feeling tired. He thought it was a cold. Then sores appeared in his groin and he would soak his bed with sweat. He took a test. On New Year’s Day 2022, at age 31, Hermida learned he had HIV. “I thought I was going to die,” he said, recalling how a chill washed over him as he reviewed his results. He struggled to navigate a new, convoluted health care system. (Sánchez, Bose and Reese, 6/24)

Obstetrics and gynecological care in much of the U.S. has transformed in the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, leaving physicians facing tough decisions as they try to provide patients with quality care and struggle to interpret unclear, confusing and strict state abortion laws. Physicians interviewed by ABC News across several states said they are relying on each other to determine what emergency and lifesaving care they can legally provide patients. (El-Bawab, 6/24)

Obstetrics and gynecology resident Dr. Cory Reiter travels more than 200 miles round trip from Indianapolis to an Illinois clinic once a week to learn how to perform abortions, which she deems a vital aspect of health care. Yet opportunities for learning how to terminate a pregnancy have dwindled in Indiana since the state’s near-total abortion ban went into effect in August, spurring Reiter and other OB-GYN residents at Indiana University School of Medicine to come to Illinois for abortion training. (Lourgos, 6/23)

Here is a state-by-state guide to abortion laws today and how they have changed in the last two years. (Crowley, 6/23)

Dobbs has had a devastating effect on pregnant people in huge swaths of the country. While the number of abortions across the country actually increased last year — thanks in large part to increasingly cheap and accessible medication abortion — that has not changed the fundamental realities of post-Dobbs America. Large reproductive care deserts have emerged in which there are no abortion providers for hundreds of miles. Pregnant people are being denied necessary medical care as their doctors fear the legal repercussions of providing it. All of this has exacerbated long-standing inequities.  (Narea, 6/24)

Vice President Harris on Sunday argued the implications of anti-abortion laws go beyond the medical procedure and present a larger “crisis” for other women’s health treatments. Harris, speaking with MSNBC on Sunday, and two years since the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, warned “everything is at stake” in the upcoming election regarding abortion and other reproductive freedoms. (Nazzaro, 6/23)

A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before. In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next time Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, and build support for those policies among lawmakers and the public. At a private event Monday evening in Washington, they will pitch a group of influential progressives on going on offense at a time when abortion is outlawed in a third of the country. (Ollstein, 6/24)

When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, it noted that it had received 14 friend-of-the-court briefs and listed them in a snug footnote at the beginning of the decision. ... In the decision that overturned Roe in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court was flooded with more than 140 amicus briefs. The footnote had metastasized, spanning seven pages. Those 50 years of amicus briefs tell a cumulative story. (Liptak, 6/24)

�鶹Ů�� Health News' 'What The Health?' Podcast: Live From Aspen: Health And The 2024 Elections

Health policy may not be the top issue in this year’s presidential and congressional elections, but it’s likely to play a key role. President Joe Biden and Democrats intend to hold Republicans responsible for the Supreme Court’s unpopular ruling overturning the right to abortion, and former President Donald Trump aims to take credit for government efforts to lower prescription drug prices — even in cases in which he played no role. (6/21)

Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion. “Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.” (Zernike, 6/24)

Michele Von Hatten is willing to endure a day of pain twice a decade for reliable birth control. Von Hatten uses an intrauterine device, or IUD, among the most effective reversible forms of birth control and an increasingly popular one. More women are choosing IUDs despite a common experience of pain during insertion that can be severe. Broader insurance coverage and improved doctor training have encouraged more women to use them. (Calfas, 6/23)

America has become much more aware of the health risks facing new mothers, but the health care system is still trying to catch up. More than half of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States occur up to one year after birth, a largely preventable tragic toll that disproportionately affects Black and Native American women. (Goldman, 6/24)

The Texas Medical Board on Friday adopted guidance on when physicians can perform emergency abortions, loosening some paperwork requirements but adding little clarity to the state ban’s exceptions. The decision follows a meeting last month in which doctors, patients and lawyers criticized an earlier proposal of the rules, with many saying it only added more administrative requirements that could further delay care in emergency situations. (Gill, 6/21)

In the last two years, Texas abortion clinics closed, legal challenges raced through the court system, towns tried to ban out-of-state travel, conservative activists made abortion pills and emergency rooms into battlegrounds, and woman after woman after woman came forward with stories of medical care delayed or denied because of confusion over Texas’ abortion laws. And five women were able to get an abortion, on average, each month. (Klibanoff, 6/24)

Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear decried "extremism" in state abortion bans during a Nashville event on reproductive rights on Friday, pointing to a lack of rape and incest exceptions in Kentucky and Tennessee law as Republicans have effectively banned nearly all abortions in both states. "Extremism pushes everybody off. It's not the right way to govern," Beshear said. "It's not the right way to make policies, because our policies aren't about proving how pure you are to this party or that party. They're about human beings." (Brown, 6/22)

A 22-year-old woman who became an abortion rights advocate after she was raped by her stepfather as a child will campaign with first lady Jill Biden in Pennsylvania this weekend as part of a 2024 election push around the anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade. Hadley Duvall of Owensboro, Kentucky, first told her story publicly last fall in a campaign ad for the governor’s race in her home state, discussing the consequences of abortion restrictions, particularly those without exceptions for rape or incest. (Long, 6/22)

Ohio voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution last year, but smaller clinics continue to provide most of the abortions in the state as Ohio’s hospitals are not increasing services or wading into the abortion debate. Abortion clinics report seeing increasing numbers of patients, including many from states outside Ohio, where women no longer have abortion rights, according to estimates, though state data won’t be available until later this year. (Hancock, 6/24)

A teacher was fired in New Hampshire after investigators concluded she secretly escorted a pregnant student to a medical appointment during the school day, ostensibly to access abortion services. The teacher admitted to her employer that she had lied about having food poisoning when she called in sick from work and drove the student to the medical facility, according to records obtained by The Boston Globe through a public records request. State officials then opened an investigation into her alleged failure to observe appropriate boundaries with the student entrusted to her care. (Porter, 6/23)

Affixed to the far window of Dr. Angel Foster’s tiny Somerville office is a large map of the United States dotted with silver stars. Each star represents the hometown of a patient, or group of patients, who received abortion pills through the mail last fall in the first month after she launched her telemedicine provider. There are stars in 13 Florida locales, 10 in Georgia, five in Indiana, and a sprinkling in Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Kentucky, Idaho, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio. (Piore, 6/21)

A Republican running to flip a competitive California House seat has an unusual strategy on abortion: Talk like a Clinton-era Democrat. “I’m a pro-choice Republican that believes abortion should be safe, legal and rare,” said Matt Gunderson, the car dealership owner challenging Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in Southern California. That position, a throwback to Democrats’ framing on abortion in the nineties, puts Gunderson in a vanishingly small club of Republicans who espouse support for abortion rights — and sets him apart from most GOP candidates who try to avoid the topic altogether. (Mason, 6/22)

Rising healthcare prices have long eroded American wages. They are doing that by eating into jobs. Companies shed workers in the year after local hospitals raise their prices, new research found. Higher hospital prices pushed up premiums for employees’ health insurance, which businesses help pay for. The new study, scheduled to be published Monday as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, is a comprehensive look at one way companies manage those higher premiums: cutting payrolls. (Evans, Mollica and Ulick, 6/23)

Sutter Health was absolved this week from a California whistleblower lawsuit alleging the nonprofit system owed $519 million for double-billing patients. After a seven-week trial, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stephen Kaus ruled Monday retired surgeon Dr. Gregory Duncan and patient Gary Hulbert failed to show that Sutter's billing practices for surgical patients were fraudulent. (Hudson, 6/21)

Risant Health, the nonprofit entity created by Kaiser Permanente, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire North Carolina's Cone Health, the nonprofit systems said Friday. Cone would be the second system to join Risant, subject to regulatory approval, following Geisinger Health earlier this year. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. It is expected to close in early 2025. (Hudson, 6/21)

Prospect Medical Holdings can move ahead with plans to sell two CharterCare hospitals in Rhode Island — if the for-profit system satisfies dozens of conditions. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha granted conditional approval Thursday for the proposed transfer of Providence-based Roger Williams Medical Center and North Providence-based Our Lady of Fatima Hospital to nonprofit ownership under the Centurion Foundation. (Hudson, 6/21)

Ardent Health Partners disclosed a more than 5% rise in revenue for 2023 on Friday, as the healthcare provider revealed its paperwork for an initial public offering in the United States. The U.S. capital market has seen a recovery in the number of IPOs in 2024, after a nearly two-year dry spell, as expectations of a soft-landing for the economy encourage companies to list their shares. (6/21)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: It’s Called An Urgent Care Emergency Center — But Which Is It?

One evening last December, Tieqiao Zhang felt severe stomach pain. After it subsided later that night, he thought it might be food poisoning. When the pain returned the next morning, Zhang realized the source of his pain might not be as “simple as bad food.” He didn’t want to wait for an appointment with his regular doctor, but he also wasn’t sure if the pain warranted emergency care, he said. (Rayasam, 6/24)

Blue Shield of California has fired a senior executive it alleges misrepresented her name and professional credentials, the insurer said Friday. The nonprofit company "involuntarily terminated" Dr. Tosha Lara-Larios and reported her to law enforcement for fraud, a Blue Shield spokesperson wrote in an email. The San Diego Union-Tribune first reported her termination. (Tepper, 6/21)

Choked. Hit. Kicked. Thrown against walls. Nurses at HCA Healthcare-owned Mission Hospital face a steady stream of assaults and violence in their workplace and say management needs to do more to prevent their physical injuries and emotional trauma. (Jones, 6/22)

UCSF is ending its long-standing and esteemed master’s program for nurse midwives in favor of a doctorate program that many alumni and others in the field say will take longer and cost more to complete — making it harder for people to become midwives at a time maternal health workers are needed more than ever. ... Students on track to graduate next year will be the final cohort in the master’s program. (Ho, 6/23)

The amount of money that Florida’s Medicaid program spends to provide emergency health care to undocumented migrants has dropped significantly after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a multi-pronged crackdown on illegal immigration amid his unsuccessful primary bid for president. DeSantis signed a law last year directing hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask patients about their immigration status when they seek treatment. While the law does not force patients to provide hospitals with an answer, immigrant rights groups feared the mandate would scare migrants away from seeking urgent medical attention. The DeSantis administration and other Florida Republicans say any marked decreases in spending are signs his immigration crackdown is working. (Sarkissian, 6/23)

Some lawmakers are exploring an 11th hour attempt to settle a showdown between Gov. Chris Sununu and the state’s hospitals over Sununu’s plan to cut their state Medicaid payments by nearly $35 million a year. Senate President Jeb Bradley said earlier this month that Sununu’s plan would take so much Medicaid funding away from hospitals, “the viability of hospitals is at stake.” Steve Ahnen, the president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, has called Sununu’s plan a “direct threat” to hospitals. (Timmins, 6/21)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Medicaid For Millions In America Hinges On Deloitte-Run Systems Plagued By Errors

Deloitte, a global consultancy that reported revenue last year of $65 billion, pulls in billions of dollars from states and the federal government for supplying technology it says will modernize Medicaid. The company promotes itself as the industry leader in building sophisticated and efficient systems for states that, among other things, screen who is eligible for Medicaid. However, a �鶹Ů�� Health News investigation of eligibility systems found widespread problems. (Pradhan and Liss, 6/24)

For decades, the Social Security Administration has denied thousands of people disability benefits by claiming they could find jobs that have all but vanished from the U.S. economy — occupations like nut sorter, pneumatic tube operator and microfilm processor. On Monday, the agency will eliminate all but a handful of those unskilled jobs from a long-outdated database used to decide who gets benefits and who is denied, ending a practice that advocates have long decried as unfair and inaccurate. (Rein, 6/24)

A Wisconsin judge on Monday is expected to consider whether to allow people with disabilities to vote electronically from home in the swing state this fall. Disability Rights Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters and four disabled people filed a lawsuit in April demanding disabled people be allowed to cast absentee ballots electronically from home. (Richmond, 6/24)

Four menthol vaping products were authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration on Friday, the first non-tobacco-flavored e-cigarette products to get the agency’s sign-off. The decision drew harsh criticism from pediatricians and anti-tobacco groups, which called it “a blow to public health” and warned of potential for “disastrous consequences” to children. (Christensen, 6/21)

In 2022, Earl Fowlkes, a Black gay activist, denounced tobacco companies for marketing e-cigarettes to his community as the latest way to hook people on nicotine. A year later he declared that vaping saves Black and LGBTQ+ lives. Fowlkes’s promotion of looser e-cigarette regulations, which came as he developed a relationship with an industry trade group, illustrates how the tobacco industry has expanded alliances with activists representing Black, LGBTQ+ and other disenfranchised groups to defend products public health experts say are harmful. (Nirappil, 6/21)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Bristol Myers Squibb's combination therapy for treating colorectal cancer in patients with a specific gene mutation, the health regulator said on Friday. The approval under the agency's accelerated process was based on an early- to mid-stage study, in which 94 previously treated patients were administered the oral drug Krazati, in combination with cetuximab. (Santhosh and L, 6/21)

Researchers have discovered how a cell surface protein called Aplp1 can play a role in spreading material responsible for Parkinson's disease from cell-to-cell in the brain. Promisingly, an FDA-approved cancer drug that targets another protein called Lag3 – which interacts with Aplp1 – blocks the spread in mice, suggesting a potential therapy may already exist. (Dyer, 6/24)

When a new medical device hits the market, there’s typically still some uncertainty about whether it works. Device makers generally do not have to submit as much, or as rigorous, clinical data to the Food and Drug Administration as their biotech counterparts. Once FDA regulators decide a device is safe and effective, companies and researchers then attempt to track how the device performs in the real world. (Lawrence, 6/24)

A patient may be able to pursue a claim against a drug or medical device maker for failing to warn of a product's risks even if the warning would not have stopped the patient's doctor from recommending it, California's highest court has ruled. The California Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion on Thursday by Justice Joshua Groban, revived a lawsuit against Somatics, the maker of an electroshock therapy device, by a woman who said she suffered brain damage after it was used to treat her severe depression. (Pierson, 6/21)

A summertime wave of COVID-19 infections is arriving earlier than last year across a growing share of the country, federal data suggests, as a new variant called LB.1 could be on track to become the latest dominant strain of the virus. For the first time in months, the CDC estimates that no states or territories are seeing COVID-19 infections slow this past week. Key virus indicators appear to be worsening fastest across a number of western states, where trends first began climbing this month. (Tin, 6/21)

State legislators and law enforcement are reinstating dormant laws that criminalize mask-wearing to penalize pro-Palestinian protesters who conceal their faces, raising concerns among covid-cautious Americans. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are poised to overturn Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) recent veto of legislation to criminalize masking. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said earlier this month she supports legislative efforts to ban masks on the subway, citing an incident where masked protesters on a train shouted, “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.” Student protesters in Ohio, Texas and Florida have been threatened with arrest for covering their faces. (Nirappil, 6/24)

Cannabis use is linked to an increased risk of more serious COVID-19 outcomes, including hospitalization and intensive care unit (ICU) admission—similar to risks from tobacco use—according to a study today in JAMA Network Open from researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. (Soucheray, 6/21)

 The partisan politics that have surrounded the federal and local responses to the Covid-19 pandemic continue to overshadow the committee aimed at examining – and learning from – the government’s response to the disease since the investigation’s start last year. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, a doctor who chairs the committee looking into the Covid response, told CNN he wants his probe to be nonpartisan, but the Ohio Republican struggles against the polarizing political climate. (Grayer, 6/24)

As the H5N1 outbreak in dairy herds approaches the three-month mark, America’s top animal health official is calling on farmers to step up the use of personal protective equipment, limit traffic onto their farms, and increase cleaning and disinfection practices in their barns and milking parlors. (Molteni, 6/24)

Lee Maassen is a dairy farmer in northwest Iowa. The area became a hot spot for bird flu after the first H5N1 infection was detected this year. It hit a commercial egg-laying operation with 4.2 million chickens in late May. The first case discovered in Iowa dairy cows came earlier this month. As of June 20, the area has seen 11 cases of the virus infecting dairy and poultry in five counties. (Brummer, 6/21)

A person has been infected with dengue fever in Hillsborough County. Health officials say the disease was acquired locally, meaning it was likely transmitted through a mosquito bite. Dengue fever is spread to humans through the bites of infected female mosquitoes of the Aedes genus, primarily Aedes aegypti. This is the eighth locally acquired case of dengue fever in Florida this year. (6/23)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Journalists Discuss Bird Flu, Tick-Borne Illnesses, And Lessons From Covid Response

�鶹Ů�� Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media in recent weeks to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances. (6/22)

Missouri Republicans continued their assault on women’s access to sexual and reproductive health care during the 2024 legislative session. This practice is becoming all too disturbing. This time, on a straight party-line vote, Republicans passed House Bill 2634. The new law, signed by Gov. Mike Parson, marks the culmination of a yearslong effort to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in Missouri. (Emily Weber, 6/24)

My daughter, Mallory, died in 2017 at the age of 25 from a multiply resistant bacterial lung infection that followed a double-lung transplant necessitated by cystic fibrosis. In the weeks before her death, my wife, Diane Shader Smith, and I sought out and obtained an innovative yet underused treatment for antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as phage therapy. Her physicians administered the therapy, but it was too late to save Mallory’s life. An autopsy, though, confirmed that the phages had reached their target and had started to work. (Mark H. Smith, 6/23)

The most recent national survey estimated 650,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2023, up 12 percent from 2022. People experiencing homelessness seek medical attention for ailments directly attributable to their living conditions—and yet the health care system fails to address the underlying problem, which creates a cycle of hospitalizations. Without more housing that people like my patient can afford, the care that doctors like me provide can be futile. (Jeremy Cygler, 6/20)

Earlier this year, healthcare professionals from many states came together at meetings organized by the National Health Care CEO Council on Gun Violence Prevention and Safety to focus on the implementation of evidence-based firearm injury prevention strategies. (Rob Allen, 6/21)

Suicide rates in the United States increased approximately 36% between 2000 and 2022, according to updated data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Suicide was responsible for just under 50,000 deaths in 2022 (the last year with complete statistics) — an all-time high. As this appalling trend continues, offering mental health assessments and care in primary care settings could help save lives. (Roshni Koli and Christine Yu Moutier, 6/24)