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A record 21.3 million people signed up for health insurance in 2024 offered through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace, the Health and Human Services Department said Wednesday. The figures include more than 5 million new enrollees. Nearly 4.2 million people with incomes of less than 250% of the federal poverty level signed up for 2024 coverage, the agency said. (DeSilva, 1/24)

States with the largest year-over-year increase in sign-ups include West Virginia (80.2%), Louisiana (75.9%), Ohio (62.2%), Indiana (59.6%) and Tennessee (59.5%), according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the marketplaces. Seven other states saw increases of 45% or more: Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Texas. Enrollment in Texas increased by just over 1 million to 3.5 million. In Florida, enrollment increased by just shy of 1 million to 4.2 million, the most of any state. Enrollment decreased only in Maine (-2.6%) and Washington, D.C. (-1.4%). (Millman, 1/24)

More Texans than ever have signed up for cheap or free health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, with more than 1 in 9 residents covered under government-subsidized health plans for 2024, according to federal health data released on Wednesday. (Harper, 1/24)

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday sounded the alarm on former President Trump’s attacks on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as she made the case that the 2024 presidential election ought to be about more than Trump’s criminal indictments. In an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday, Pelosi took aim at Trump’s recent statement that “ObamaCare sucks” and his claim to replace it with something better, saying Democrats should emphasize to voters that their health care could be at risk. (1/24, Fortinsky)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: The Colonoscopies Were Free. But The ‘Surgical Trays’ Came With $600 Price Tags

Chantal Panozzo and her husband followed their primary care doctors’ orders last year after they both turned 45, now the recommended age to start screening for colorectal cancer. They scheduled their first routine colonoscopies a few months apart. Panozzo said she was excited to get a colonoscopy, of all things, because it meant free care. The couple run a business out of their suburban home near Chicago and purchase coverage costing more than $1,400 each month for their family of four on the exchange, which was created by the Affordable Care Act. (Liss, 1/25)

The pharmacy benefit manager industry could look a lot different soon if Congress follows through with bipartisan efforts to pass bills governing the sector. PBMs such as CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRx would face new transparency requirements that would give health insurance companies, employers, customers and regulators new insights into how they negotiate prices for prescription medicines—and how much of the savings they generate find their way to patients and plan sponsors. Pending legislation also would prohibit lucrative practices such as spread pricing. (Berryman, 1/24)

Over the past two years, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has attempted to crack down on the pharmaceutical industry over concerns that drug companies too often use various means to thwart competition that could otherwise lower prices for consumers. The agency is doing so as part of a wider effort by the Biden administration to address the controversy over prescription drug costs, which remains a pocketbook issue for many Americans. By tapping the FTC, the administration is hoping to send a message to drug companies that any moves to unfairly establish monopolies — and cost consumers money — will not be tolerated. (Silverman, 1/24)

An analysis published Wednesday found that Black Medicaid patients are more likely to be hospitalized for preventable conditions. The new analysis by the Urban Institute found that Black Medicaid enrollees were “significantly more likely” to be hospitalized for preventable reasons than white patients. Preventable conditions included asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes and heart failure. (Sforza, 1/24)

Hannah Kaplanis applied to Missouri’s Medicaid program nearly two months ago, but hasn’t received any response from the state. Just shy of 18 weeks pregnant, she’s in need of prenatal care and growing increasingly hopeless. Aside from a free ultrasound in November, she hasn’t been able to access any care. She called Missouri’s Medicaid helpline earlier this month but had to hang up after waiting on hold for 45 minutes, and she is unable to apply for other insurance until she is out of Medicaid limbo. (Bates, 1/25)

More than 64,000 women and girls became pregnant because of rape in states that implemented abortion bans after Roe v. Wade was overruled, according to a new research estimate published online Wednesday. The research letter, published by JAMA Internal Medicine and headed up by the medical director at Planned Parenthood of Montana, estimated that nearly 520,000 rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies across 14 states, most of which had no exceptions that allowed for terminations of pregnancies that occurred as a result of rape. (Lebowitz, 1/24)

Texas saw an estimated 26,313 rape-related pregnancies during the 16 months after the state outlawed all abortions, with no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That’s the highest estimate among the 14 states with total abortion bans, with Texas having the largest population, according to the study. (Gill, 1/24)

“Women across our nation should not be subject to extreme and oppressive laws that dictate what they can do with their bodies, including and especially after surviving a violent crime,” Harris said in a statement to the Chronicle. “As a lifelong fighter for the health and wellbeing of women and children, this is immoral. The women of Texas and women of America deserve the freedom to make these personal decisions without the government telling them what to do. I will continue to fight for the fundamental freedoms of everyone throughout the country.” (Gill, 1/24)

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden have extended an invitation to attend the State of the Union address to a Texas woman who sued her state and lost over the ability to get an abortion to end a wanted pregnancy. The Texas Supreme Court denied Katie Cox’s request. But by then, her lawyers said, she had already traveled out of state for an abortion. The Bidens spoke with Cox on Sunday and invited her to the annual address set for March 7 at the U.S. Capitol. Cox will sit with the first lady, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday. Cox accepted the invitation, she said. (Long, 1/24)

A federal program that provides nutritious foods for pregnant people and babies is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall — and advocates are worried that for the first time in its 50-year history, it could become a casualty of a dysfunctional congressional appropriations process. (Becker, 1/24)

Medicaid implementation, substance use disorder and service cuts are just some of the critical issues facing people who give birth in Connecticut, according to leaders, advocates and state officials who gathered at the Capitol on Tuesday to discuss barriers to maternal care. As several attendees noted, the maternal mortality rate is rising in Connecticut. Tiffany Donelson, president of the Connecticut Health Foundation, pointed out that the dangers of childbirth don’t impact everyone equally. (Golvala, 1/24)

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Esa Davis encountered a situation that millions of Black women in hospitals and birthing centers had faced before her: She was sick, and her doctors wouldn’t listen to her. Davis, a family physician who now serves the University of Maryland, Baltimore as its inaugural associate vice president for community health, had experienced a relatively uneventful pregnancy before delivering her firstborn child. But about two or three days after her cesarean section, she couldn’t walk without being short of breath and had swelling from her feet to her waist. (Roberts, 1/24)

New York City on Wednesday designated social media a public health hazard for its effect on youth mental health, becoming the first major city in the United States to take such a step, Mayor Eric Adams (D) said in an address. “Companies like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features,” Adams said in the annual State of the City address. (Ables, 1/25)

Bill sponsor Fiona McFarland, R-Sarasota, called social media “digital fentanyl.” “Social media companies themselves know how addictive their technology is, and they’re even unable to police the bad guys,” McFarland said on the House floor before the vote. “Despite their best efforts, content about human trafficking and child pornography keep slipping into the algorithm.”  (Soule, 1/24)

A former insider at tech giant Meta has said that social media companies are failing to keep kids safe online, and that government regulators must step in. “Regulators are our last hope at peace. They really are our last hope,” Arturo Béjar told POLITICO at a cafe in central London on Tuesday, shortly before a meeting with the country’s media regulator Ofcom, which will be tasked with enforcing Britain’s sprawling new internet rulebook, the Online Safety Act. (Manancourt, 1/24)

Fragmented and focused social platforms might be good for helping you find a knitting community. But extremist groups are also using them to normalize darker content. (Zuckerman, 1/14)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Native American Communities Have The Highest Suicide Rates, Yet Interventions Are Scarce 

Amanda MorningStar has watched her children struggle with mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts. She often wonders why. “We’re family-oriented and we do stuff together. I had healthy pregnancies. We’re very protective of our kids,” said MorningStar, who lives in Heart Butte, Montana, a town of about 600 residents on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. (Platzman Weinstock, 1/25)

Colorado has for years been short on in-patient psychiatric beds for people with severe mental illness, creating a backlog that means people wait months for care and sit in jail instead of a hospital. The last time the national Treatment Advocacy Center released a status report on the psychiatric bed shortage, Colorado placed 34th among states with 543 beds. (Brown, 1/24)

Each day is different for Nils Dybvig, a senior social worker with Hennepin County who works out of the Brooklyn Park Police Department. Dybvig has been a social worker for decades and joined the police department’s Alternative Response Team in December of 2022, when the program first launched. (Thamer, 1/25)

In the wake of the death of a New Jersey sheriff, who appeared to have taken his own life in a restaurant, Gov. Phil Murphy and other state and local officials have emphasized that mental health resources are available for law enforcement officers and first responders. Research has shown that police officers and firefighters are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. Despite the resources available, the stigma around asking for help is still there. (Wallace, Myers, Fagan, Nguyen, 1/25)

The Ohio Senate voted Wednesday to override Gov. Mike DeWine's veto of legislation that restricts medical care for transgender minors and blocks transgender girls from female sports. The bill prohibits doctors from prescribing hormones, puberty blockers or gender reassignment surgery before patients turn 18 and requires mental health providers to get parental permission to diagnose and treat gender dysphoria. It also bans transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams in high school and college. (BeMiller, 1/24)

Legislation seeking to create a “parents bill of rights” in Missouri was amended in committee Tuesday morning to add prohibitions on transgender students accessing restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. A House hearing on standalone bills that sought to regulate school bathrooms took up the majority of a nearly nine-hour meeting last week. Missourians haven’t had a chance to testify on bathroom restrictions in the Senate this year, a fact that irked Democrats as the committee’s chairman — Republican Sen. Andrew Koenig of Manchester — briefly introduced the amendment. (Hanshaw, 1/24)

Expecting lawsuits over legislation to exclude transgender people from gender-specific spaces in Utah, the proposal’s sponsor in the Utah Senate substituted the House-approved bill on Wednesday to reduce where those restrictions would apply. After changing the legal definitions of “female” and “male” to exclude transgender people, the bill introduced by Morgan Republican Rep. Kera Birkeland would have barred them from entering sex-specific spaces, like restrooms and locker rooms, that affirm their gender identity. (Stern, 1/24)

You’ll often hear lawmakers, activists and pundits argue that many transgender people regret their decision to have gender-affirming surgeries – a belief that’s been fueling a wave of legislation that restricts access to gender-affirming health care. Gender-affirming care can include surgical procedures such as facial reconstruction, chest or “top” surgery, and genital or “bottom” surgery. But in an article we recently published in JAMA Surgery, we challenge the notion that transgender people often regret gender-affirming surgeries. Evidence suggests that less than 1% of transgender people who undergo gender-affirming surgery report regret. That proportion is even more striking when compared to the fact that 14.4% of the broader population reports regret after similar surgeries. (Barbee, Hassan and Liang, 1/22)

Transgender women, in particular those belonging to marginalized racial and ethnic groups, have disproportionately high rates of HIV. Yet so far, no standardized surveillance system has collected data that could provide insight into the factors that put people at higher risk for contracting the virus. (Gaffney and Merelli, 1/25)

A rare fungal infection thought to mainly occur in the northern Midwest and parts of the Southeast is more common in other parts of the U.S. than expected, new research published Wednesday finds. The illness, called blastomycosis, can be difficult to diagnose, in part because it can resemble other respiratory infections. And the longer it goes undiagnosed, the more difficult it is to treat.  (Sullivan, 1/24)

Robitussin manufacturer, Haleon, is voluntarily recalling eight lots of its cough syrup due to microbial contamination, the manufacturer announced Wednesday. There have been no reports of adverse events related to this recall, Haleon said in its statement. The recall includes six lots of Robitussin Honey CF Max Day Adult, 4 oz. and 8 oz., and two lots of Robitussin Honey CF Max Adult, in 8 oz. (Fortinsky, 1/24)

UPMC Children's Hospital took part in a new study that found that if pregnant women get the flu vaccine, it dramatically reduces the chance their newborn will go to the ER or be hospitalized for the flu. Children's was one of seven hospitals around the country that studied how the flu vaccine in pregnant moms protected newborns who can't get the flu vaccine until they're 6 months old. They found it reduced hospitalizations or ER visits in young babies by about a third, and for the youngest infants under 3 months old, it went down by half. (Sorensen, 1/24)

You’ve heard of long Covid, a condition in which the acute infection subsides but troubling symptoms persist. Less well known is chronic Covid: The virus just doesn’t leave, sometimes staying in patients’ bodies long enough to mutate into new variants. This happens to people whose immune systems are compromised, whether through disease or treatment, leaving them vulnerable to infections that last weeks, months, or, in one known case, a year. (Cooney, 1/24)

A new small study of 85 men in China shows COVID-19 infections do impact semen quality, but only temporarily. The study is published in Virology Journal. (Soucheray, 1/24)

Rates of death, vision loss, and pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) admissions among diabetes patients spiked during the pandemic, finds a systematic review of 138 studies from around the world. (Van Beusekom, 1/24)

South America is seeing a surge in cases of the mosquito-borne disease dengue during the southern hemisphere summer, prompting Brazil to roll out a novel vaccine campaign, while in Argentina many stores have run out of bug spray. With 2023 already having set a record for dengue cases in the region, Argentina has seen a sharp spike in the disease that's endemic in much of Latin America. While often asymptomatic, dengue can be fatal. (Brito and Elliott, 1/25)

The rollout of malaria vaccines in Africa – the world's first routine immunization program against this mosquito-borne disease – has raised excitement for a surprising reason. The vaccine reduces all kinds of deaths among children – not just malaria deaths – by 13%. This RTS,S vaccine is "not only a huge step forward for malaria control but also a major advancement in child health," says Dr. Mary Hamel, the World Health Organization's senior technical officer on malaria, in an email interview with NPR. (Bajaj, 1/24)

Some scientists are warning of the potential for "Arctic zombie viruses" in Siberia, according to reports. The claim is that as climate change causes the Arctic permafrost to thaw, it will release ancient viruses that could put people at risk of disease. National Geographic defines "permafrost" as "a permanently frozen layer below Earth’s surface [that] consists of soil, gravel and sand, usually bound together by ice." ... "It is now clear that a significant proportion of prehistorical viruses can remain infectious for even longer periods of time," Claverie wrote. (Rudy, 1/25)

Pregnant women living in parts of Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ are far more likely to give birth prematurely and to babies that have low birth weight compared to women living outside the state, according to research in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday.  The research, which is part of a study currently under peer review, argues people living in Louisiana’s most air-polluted areas have premature birth rates as high as 25.3 percent, almost twice the state average of 13.5 percent. That number is also about two and a half times the U.S. average of 10.4 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (O'Connell-Domenech, 1/25)

A year after an investigation revealed widespread use of a substandard cancer drug, the World Health Organization and national drug regulators around the world have come under fire for failing to protect children from the dangerous chemotherapy. (Furneaux and Margottini, 1/25)

When is cancer not cancer? It’s an unexpected question that has stirred the world of cancer treatment in recent years, most notably now with prostate cancer. A growing number of doctors are advocating what might seem like an unusual position: That low-grade prostate cancers that grow very slowly or not at all shouldn’t be called cancer or carcinoma. The reason, they say, is that those words scare men, their families and sometimes even their doctors into seeking more aggressive treatment than patients need—leaving men with debilitating side effects—rather than pursuing a carefully monitored wait-and-see approach.  (Reddy, 1/24)

Nature talks to Sholto David about his process for flagging image manipulation and his tips for scientists under scrutiny. (Kozlov, 1/24)

Congressional Republicans are rallying behind Zyn, a brand of flavored oral nicotine pouches, amid a push from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for federal action on the tobacco and electronic cigarette alternative. “This calls for a Zynsurrection!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on X, formerly Twitter. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, posted a photo of himself holding a pack of Zyn on X. “Big Brother Schumer doesn’t want us to chew or smoke. Now he’s against an alternative that’s helped many quit. Come and take it!” Hudson said in the post. (Brooks, 1/24)

The American Lung Association is urging state and federal lawmakers to crack down on the sale of flavored tobacco products. In a scathing new report released Wednesday, the organization argues products like wintergreen chewing tobacco, fruit-flavored vapes and menthol cigarettes, as well as targeted marketing schemes, not only harm young users but can lead to a disproportionate number of tobacco deaths among Black Minnesotans compared to their white peers. (Wurzer, Stockton and Levin, 1/24)

The Food and Drug Administration issued a new warning late Tuesday about supplements that contain the ingredient tianeptine, commonly known as "gas station heroin." The products — sold under the name Neptune’s Fix and often found at gas stations, convenience stores and online — are linked to serious side effects including seizures, loss of consciousness and death. ... Tianeptine is an antidepressant that is approved in some European, Asian and Latin American countries, but not in the United States. (Lovelace Jr., 1/24)

Three people sought medical treatment for dangerously low blood sugar in the U.S. last year after taking suspected fake versions of Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug Ozempic, America's Poison Centers told Reuters. One person also experienced hypoglycemia in 2023 after injecting a compounded version of Ozempic, said the organization, which represents 55 regional poison centers across the country and works with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to identify public health risks. (Wingrove, 1/24)

Stew Leonard's is recalling some cookies after a person died. The Vanilla Florentine cookies were made by an outside manufacturer and sold only at Stew Leonard's in Danbury and Newington, Conn. from Nov. 6 - Dec. 31, 2023. The cookies contained peanuts, but that wasn't listed on the label. Órla Baxendale, 25, a dancer, died anaphylactic shock. It's believed she consumed the cookies while at an event in Connecticut. (Zanger, 1/24)

The Pennsylvania attorney general's office and the state Department of Agriculture have filed a lawsuit against Miller's Organic Farm after authorities say they've been trying to bring it into compliance with the law for years. The complaint submitted Tuesday alleges the violation of multiple laws, including Pennsylvania's Milk Sanitation Law and the Food Safety Act. Two recent E. coli illnesses reported by other state's departments of health are suspected to have originated from Miller's Organic Farm raw milk, the attorney general's office said. (Bartos, 1/24)

A new estimate shows hearing loss affects approximately 37.9 million Americans and is more common in rural areas than urban ones and in men than women. The study, published Wednesday in The Lancet Regional Health-Americas Journal, is the first to estimate hearing loss rates at the state and county level, and was led by NORC at the University of Chicago. The estimates are for 2019 and only include people who have hearing loss in both ears. (Shastri, 1/24)

A kind of protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease might also contribute to the breakdown of cartilage that’s characteristic of osteoarthritis. In a new study, published in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday, researchers analyzed tissue samples and joint fluid from 12 people, both those with osteoarthritis and healthy controls. They found those with osteoarthritis in their knee had a fourfold increase in apolipoprotein E, or APOE. (Cueto, 1/24)

When Kenneth Eugene Smith enters the death chamber at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., on Thursday night, he will be in a place that is at once familiar and entirely unknown. Smith, 58, is expected to be placed on the same gurney that was used 14 months earlier, when he survived a botched lethal injection that was eventually called off because his death warrant was expiring and prison workers failed to set his IV line. But instead of being administered lethal drugs, prison workers will place a mask over his face and start the process of making Smith the first person executed by an untested method that uses nitrogen gas to force death by oxygen depravation, a process known as nitrogen hypoxia. (Bellware, 1/25)

A report from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services concludes that the owners of a north St. Louis nursing home didn’t develop emergency protocols and procedures before moving residents out in December. (Fentem and Davis, 1/24)

Florida senators Monday began moving forward with a proposal that would make major changes in the state’s medical malpractice laws, including limiting pain-and-suffering damages in lawsuits against doctors and hospitals. The proposal refueled a decades-long debate in the Capitol about damage caps, pitting doctors, hospitals, insurers and business groups against plaintiffs’ attorneys and people who said they had suffered from malpractice. (Saunders, 1/24)

�鶹Ů�� Health News and NPR News: New York Joins Local Governments In Erasing Billions In Medical Debt

New York City pledged this week to pay down $2 billion worth of residents’ medical debt. In doing so, it has come around to an innovation, started in the Midwest, that’s ridding millions of Americans of health care debt. The idea of local government erasing debt emerged a couple of years ago in Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago. Toni Preckwinkle, president of the county board of commissioners, says two staffers came to her with a bold proposal: The county could spend a portion of its federal pandemic rescue funds to ease a serious burden on its residents. (Noguchi, 1/25)

Moises Chacon is number 14,861. Jon Cordero’s number is in the 15,000s. Oumar Camara’s wristband says he is number 16,700. The men are all migrants who have come up against New York City’s 30-day limit for single adults on stays at any one homeless shelter. After 30 days, anyone who wants to stay in the shelter system has to reapply. But there are not enough beds these days, so each person has to take a number at a city office in the East Village in Manhattan, and wait. (Newman and Parnell, 1/24)

The Washington state attorney general announced a $149.5 million settlement Wednesday with drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, more than four years after the state sued the company over its role in the opioid addiction crisis. “They knew what the harm was. They did it anyway,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters Wednesday. (Valdes and Golden, 1/24)

The last time Lesley Overfield went to see her son in jail, everything had changed. She visited El Dorado County Jail every two weeks or so, and when she’d previously seen him, he’d been fine, walking and talking and looking healthy. But on April 22, when she visited her 38-year-old, HIV-positive son at the facility near Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border, he was completely different. Nicholas Overfield was in a wheelchair. He was unable to lift the phone to talk with his mother from behind the glass partition in the visiting room. Then he leaned forward and put his head down on the table. The two never spoke on that visit. Two months later, he was dead of a viral infection, varicella zoster virus encephalitis, which is among the conditions associated with AIDS, according to his family’s attorney, Ty Clarke. Medical records show that Overfield was not administered his HIV antiretroviral medications while in jail. Now, Lesley Overfield is suing over her son’s death. (Goldberg, 1/24)

A group of more than 70 leading addiction researchers and advocates penned a letter to Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and state lawmakers requesting a dissolution of the Research Advisory Panel of California, which they call a “nonviable obstruction to essential research and public health activities in California.” Dissolving the panel would require passage of state legislation. “The cost of these RAPC delays is immense, entirely unique to California, and limiting the State’s capacity to respond to health crises tightly intertwined with homelessness,” the group’s letter reads. (Angst, 1/24)

Barracks that house service members undergoing medical treatment at a Texas military hospital lost heat during frigid temperatures throughout the region last week, Military.com learned. Liberty Barracks, located on Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, serves troops who are being treated at Brooke Army Medical Center. The heating stopped Jan. 15 in several rooms, and was out for a week, exposing vulnerable patients to unseasonably cold temperatures. (Novelly, 1/24)

The Defense Department is doing an about-face on a major component of reforms it launched seven years ago to reduce medical care costs, abandoning a plan to push family members and military retirees to private-sector care. In a memo sent last month to senior Pentagon leaders, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks outlined an effort to "re-attract" beneficiaries to military hospitals and clinics -- at least 7% of those now receiving medical care through Tricare, the DoD's private health program, by Dec. 31, 2026. (Kime, 1/24)

Friend Community Healthcare System’s hospital was hours from closing its doors in July. The City of Friend, a community of about 900 people in southeast Nebraska, gave its local hospital, Warren Memorial Hospital, $250,000 to help administrators make payroll and fund operations. But that was only a temporary solution for the 15-bed critical access hospital, which has struggled against bigger competitors in Lincoln and Omaha as it treats an increasing number of Medicaid beneficiaries. (Kacik, 1/24)

Massachusetts legislators are feverishly working to prevent the closure of hospitals amid the financial crisis at Steward Health Care, according to one lawmaker, who said options on the table include measures to potentially order endangered facilities into receivership. State Representative Andy Vargas, a Haverhill Democrat, said in a statement late Wednesday that local legislative leaders had been meeting daily “for several weeks” about the precarious financial status of one of Steward Health Care’s hospitals — Holy Family Hospital, which has campuses in both Haverhill and Methuen. (Bartlett, 1/24)

A dispute between U.S. News & World Report and the San Francisco city attorney’s office over the media company’s well-known but increasingly scrutinized system for ranking hospitals and other healthcare institutions has in recent weeks turned into an all-out legal battle. San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu issued two subpoenas to the media company earlier this month. The first demanded answers about the company’s process for ranking hospitals. The second ... might reveal ... whether the financial relationships with hospitals are a factor. (Rector, 1/24)

Nearly 80% of health care providers say it's important for their hospital to minimize its environmental impact, according to a large new Commonwealth Fund survey of clinicians. Health care accounts for 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with hospitals responsible for the largest portion of those emissions. (Goldman, 1/24)

When Jessica Aguilar had an acute gallbladder attack last year, she had no choice but to bring her 12-year-old twins with her to the emergency room at 3 a.m. The boys, who are both on the autism spectrum, are somewhat familiar with trailing their mother to adult spaces. Aguilar, a single parent, has approval for some Medicaid caregiving services for her sons, but more often than not over the past three years she has been unable to find a caregiver. (Hoban, 1/25)

Got an upcoming doctor's appointment? Perhaps a prescription to refill or a dental cleaning? Odds are your phone has been pinging away with incessant reminders about it. It's not just you. There's a growing flood of emails, texts, phone calls and other prods to patients that — beyond just potentially becoming another digital annoyance — may make them tune out the important stuff. (Reed, 1/25)

A Saudi doctor saw his fortune close in on $12 billion on Thursday as shares of his healthcare firm rebounded, returning him to the ranks of the Middle East’s wealthiest private individuals. Shares in Sulaiman Al Habib’s eponymous company have surged 30% since hitting a one-year low in October. That’s made Al Habib — who founded the firm and holds a 40% stake — the third-richest person in the Middle East who’s not a member of a royal family, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. (Martin, 1/25)

Today researchers from the University of Michigan published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases more evidence that being vaccinated against COVID-19 significantly reduces the risk of developing long COVID. (Soucheray, 1/24)

Full-term babies of mothers infected with COVID-19 during pregnancy had triple the risk of experiencing respiratory distress (RD) compared to those who weren't exposed to the virus before they were born, researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) reported today. (Schnirring, 1/24)

An immune component of breast milk known as the complement system shapes the gut environment of infant mice in ways that make them less susceptible to certain disease-causing bacteria, according to a new study. (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 1/24)

Nearly one third of adults in a Swedish cohort who contracted bacterial meningitis as children have permanent neurologic disabilities as a result, a new JAMA Network Open study suggests. (Van Beusekom, 1/22)

In 1998, Viagra received FDA approval. A financial bonanza followed for its manufacturer, Pfizer, and later for its competitors. Although initially approved—and marketed—specifically for erectile dysfunction, Pfizer and later competitors used aggressive targeted marketing to catapult the drug from an erectile dysfunction treatment to a lifestyle pill pocketed by nervous 30-year-olds heading out on Internet dates. (Arthur Caplan ,1/24)

The debate over prohibition should be settled law. Banning marijuana doesn’t work. But federal and state regulators should make rules governing legal marijuana products to protect public health, just as they do with any other food, drink, and drug. That may mean considering imposing additional potency limits, while ensuring that consumers know, through accurate labeling and education, what they are ingesting. (1/25)

When 53% of Tennessee voters agreed to remove state constitutional protections for abortion, they were not asked if they wanted to criminalize the delivery of healthcare, difficult pregnancies or the desperation of a pregnant minor to obtain reproductive care. (David Plazas, 1/24)

Imagine this scene: You are a cancer patient already navigating fear and uncertainty around your treatment, when you inexplicably cannot access the care recommended by your cancer doctor. This turns out to be because of a perverse hurdle imposed by your insurance company — called a prior authorization — that ends in a denial of care. (Tina Shah and Devika Bhushan, 1/25)