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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris vowed twice this week to revive Democratic plans to expand the welfare state, previewing a campaign message against Donald Trump and potentially signaling one of her top priorities should she be elected. In remarks to campaign staff in Delaware on Monday and a campaign speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the vice president focused on key parts of President Biden’s domestic agenda that failed to pass because of resistance from Republicans and centrist Democrats. In both speeches, Harris highlighted the need for legislation to expand paid family leave, housing assistance, child care and eldercare — parts of the “care economy” that advisers say have been one of her top priorities in the administration. (Stein, 7/24)

Vice President Kamala Harris is leaning into her background as a prosecutor to campaign against former president Donald Trump. That experience could also spell a warning for major health players. As California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2016, she expanded the powers of the office to referee hospital consolidation, helped block a mega merger between insurers Cigna and Anthem, and launched lawsuits to bring down inflated drug prices. (King and Bluth, 7/24)

When she speaks about the economy, Kamala Harris often talks about the mothers in her life. Her own mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a single parent who worked as a breast cancer researcher. She’d pack lunches before Harris and her sister, Maya, woke up in the morning, and pay the bills at night after the girls went to bed. (Carrazana and Luterman, 7/24)

Of all the reasons Kamala Harris is better equipped than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November—her relative youth, the fact that she’s a former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon—her biggest advantage may be her record on abortion. Harris served as the Biden administration’s de facto advocate for reproductive rights; it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception. (Filipovic, 7/24)

Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. His care had been paid for in part with help from the family. After Mr. Trump was elected, Fred Trump wanted to use his connection to the White House for good. With the help of Ivanka Trump, his cousin, and Ben Carson, at the time the housing and urban development secretary, he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle. After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.” (McCreesh, 7/24)

When Ella Emhoff graduated from college in 2021, Vice President Harris posed smiling beside her stepdaughter. At Cole Emhoff’s wedding in October, Harris officiated her stepson’s ceremony. The Emhoff siblings have affectionately dubbed Harris “Momala,” a name she has said she wears proudly. But Harris’s parental role was altogether erased in recent and resurfaced attacks from her political opponents. In a video drawn from a 2021 interview on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” J.D. Vance, now the GOP vice-presidential nominee, said that Harris and other prominent Democrats (including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future because they are “people without children.” (Gibson, 7/24)

President Biden on Wednesday said he intends to call for Supreme Court reform as he laid out his plans for his final six months in office. Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office outlining his decision not to seek reelection, his first on-camera remarks since making that announcement on Sunday. In addition to explaining why he is ending his candidacy, he listed off his priorities for his remaining time as president. (Samuels, 7/24)

Before announcing his exit, Joe Biden expressed interest in reforming the Supreme Court. But, in the spirit of re-balancing the three branches of government, isn’t that a job for Congress? (7/25)

President Joe Biden was all set to announce a major initiative to reform the U.S. Supreme Court, just days before he suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The new presumptive nominee’s own plans regarding the Court now remain to be seen, but there are indications that Harris will move forward with similar proposals to create term limits and enforceable ethics rules for the justices. And there’s a real possibility that Harris will also support broader reform measures to increase the number of justices on the Court, and to limit the number of justices each president can nominate. (Kanu, 7/24)

A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a Biden administration ban on forced reset triggers, devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire at faster rates, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a ban on bump stocks last month. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled in favor of guns-rights groups that had sued the U.S. Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2023 challenging the ban. (Wu, 7/24)

A cognitive neurologist shares reaction to the intense national discussion sparked by president's exit from 2024 race. "When I started to study age-related cognitive changes, the “old” people we investigated were in their mid-60s. Today, people in their 60s tend to be thought of as middle-aged," said Kirk Daffner, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cognitive neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. (Powell, 7/24)

Infant mortality rates in the United States increased by 3% in 2022, according to a new federal report published early Thursday morning. Researchers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics looked at linked birth and death data sets -- information from the death certificate linked to the information from the birth certificate -- from the National Vital Statistics System. (Kekatos, 7/25)

Infant mortality in the US has been generally trending down since at least 1995, when consistent tracking started, but rates are still much higher in the US than they are in many peer nations. There have been some small upticks over that time, but 2022 was the first time there was a statistically significant increase since 2002, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Experts say that any increase is cause for concern. (McPhillips, 7/25)

A group of Republican-led states do not have legal standing to try to get a court to impose restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, including a ban on prescribing it by telemedicine and dispensing it by mail, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday. The decision comes the month after the U.S. Supreme Court preserved access to the pill by finding that anti-abortion groups and doctors in a separate case do not have standing to seek restrictions on it. The Supreme Court did not rule on the underlying merits of the case, leaving the pill open to future challenges. (Pierson, 7/24)

Attorneys argued Tuesday over whether a North Dakota judge should toss a lawsuit challenging the state’s abortion ban, with the state saying the plaintiffs’ case rests on hypotheticals, and the plaintiffs saying key issues remain to be resolved at a scheduled trial. State District Judge Bruce Romanick said he will rule as quickly as he can, but he also asked the plaintiffs’ attorney what difference he would have at the court trial in August. (Dura, 7/23)

A Texas woman who was jailed and charged with murder after self-managing an abortion in 2022 can move forward with her lawsuit against the local sheriff and prosecutors over the case that drew national outrage before the charges were quickly dropped, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton denied a motion by prosecutors and the sheriff to dismiss the lawsuit during a hearing in the border city of McAllen. Lizelle Gonzalez, who spent two nights in jail on the murder charges and is seeking $1 million in damages in the lawsuit, did not attend the hearing. (Gonzalez, 7/24)

A new study paints a complex picture of the outbreak, suggesting that the virus could be spreading in multiple ways and that it is not always mild in cows. (Anthes, 7/24)

A new report has sounded the alarm on the evolution of the avian influenza virus, with comprehensive genome sequencing showing that the current strain is now capable of multidirectional infections across species. While human-to-human risk remains low, it's a worrying step towards the virus honing its transmission ability. (Thompson, 7/25)

For more than two years, the US poultry industry has been battling a highly virulent strain of avian influenza, or bird flu. The virus has driven up egg and turkey prices and crossed over from infecting just birds to numerous mammalian species, including sea lions, mice, cats, dairy cows, and, increasingly, humans. And it shows no signs of stopping — only reaching new milestones. (Torrella, 7/24)

For nearly four months, the spread of bird flu in the nation’s dairy cattle has stoked fears that, if left unchecked, the virus could eventually unleash a pandemic. The recent cluster of human cases connected to poultry farms in Colorado only underscores that the threat remains real. Genetic sequencing of the virus collected from the sickened poultry workers closely resembles what’s circulating in dairy herds, suggesting that cattle somehow introduced the virus into the poultry flock. (Stone, 7/24)

COVID rates are higher in certain states amid a nationwide summer wave, according to the CDC. COVID hot spot states include Florida, Oregon, Washington and more. (Kee, 7/24)

After a handful of Australian water polo players tested positive for Covid-19 this week, questions have emerged around how the spread of the disease will be mitigated at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris. Five players on Australia’s women’s water polo team have tested positive for Covid-19 as of Wednesday. (Howard, 7/24)

Demand for flu shots is declining, particularly among some of the most medically vulnerable groups, raising concerns that the vaccines may be falling out of favor in a post-pandemic world. While uptake for flu shots has never been stellar, experts say vaccine fatigue, shifting attitudes and lowered public trust may be eroding demand. (Reed, 7/25)

The U.S. Navy has reached a settlement with sailors who filed a lawsuit over the service's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, ending a nearly four-year saga that pitted Navy SEALs and other service members against their commander in chief. Under an agreement in the case announced Wednesday, Navy sailors who refused the vaccine for religious reasons can now have their records corrected and will be protected against discrimination on promotion boards for the next three years, according to their attorneys. (Kime, 7/24)

A twice-yearly injection could help prevent HIV infections, according to the results of a new study described by medical experts as a breakthrough. In a randomized trial involving more than 5,000 young women and girls in South Africa and Uganda, none of those who received the prevention shots contracted HIV. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. (Pannett, 7/25)

A new way to prevent HIV infection is generating great buzz -- and more than a bit of controversy -- at this week’s AIDS 2024 Conference in Munich. ... These results were significant enough for the Data Monitoring Committee -- an independent group of experts appointed to assess the progress of clinical trials -- to recommend that Gilead halt its blinded trial and offer lenacapavir to all study participants. On June 20, Gilead announced these results, and now, all participants can choose to receive the injection. (Barros Guinle, 7/24)

After its nationwide rollout on Earth Day, the HeatRisk forecasting tool is getting a real-world test as deadly temperatures stress much of the US. Created by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, HeatRisk combines public health data and weather forecasts to create a map of threatening heat across the country. Similar to how tornadoes and hurricanes are categorized, the tool ranks heat waves on a scale of 0 to 4 based on how dangerous they are. (Battle Abdelal, 7/24)

Whether it’s the dog days of summer or a cold snap in the dead of winter, extreme temperatures tend to bring people’s activities to a halt — including doctors’ appointments. Seniors in particular are more likely to skip their scheduled medical visits if it’s too hot or too cold, according to a study from the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. On days that are 90 degrees or hotter, for every 1 degree increase in temperature, the rate of missed appointments rises by 0.64%, as reported by researchers at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Rudy, 7/24)

Living near parks, bike trails and green space is as important as being motivated when it comes to achieving your fitness goals, experts say. Not all communities provide such amenities. Those that hit all the marks showed up in the annual American Fitness Index released Tuesday by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the Elevance Health Foundation. The index ranks the nation’s 100 largest cities on 33 personal and community health indicators. (Alltucker, 7/23)

Health officials are investigating a possible second death linked to a brand of recalled microdosing mushroom-infused edibles. Since the Food and Drug Administration's initial June warning about Diamond Shruumz-brand Microdosing Chocolate Bars – and some users having bad reactions including seizures and vomiting – the agency has tracked 74 cases in 28 states. (Snider, 7/24)

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that upended computer systems across the world last week, said it had identified a quality-control flaw that led to outages for millions of Microsoft Windows users — including health care systems — and how it got onto its systems. In an incident report published Wednesday, the company said a bug in a quality-control tool it uses to check system updates for mistakes allowed a critical flaw to be pushed to users’ machines. (Vipers and Rundle, 7/24)

Humana's CenterWell health services unit plans to offer senior care at 23 Walmart Supercenter stores, taking space previously occupied by the now-shuttered Walmart Health business. The clinics in Georgia, Missouri and Florida, which will operate under the CenterWell Senior Primary Care and Conviva Care brand names, are expected to open in the first half of next year, Humana said Wednesday. (DeSilva, 7/24)

San Jose community leaders are decrying a plan by HCA Healthcare to expand a local hospital on the western edge of the city while downgrading care at Regional Medical Center on the East Side. ... On Wednesday evening, community members continued to rally in front of the hospital — this time taking aim at HCA’s decision to expand Good Samaritan Hospital just 14-miles away in a more affluent part of the city. The project, which is being done to comply with state seismic regulations, calls for two new hospital wings that will increase the number of beds from 404 to 419. (Hase, 7/24)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Montana Looks To Become Latest State To Boost Nonprofit Hospital Oversight 

Montana is poised to become the latest state to increase scrutiny of how its nonprofit hospitals deliver community benefits in exchange for their tax-exempt status. Under proposed rules, the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services plans to collect data on nonprofit hospitals’ charitable acts, such as discounting prices, providing health education, or conducting free screenings. Montana officials expect to adopt the new rules in August, but state officials have yet to set standards for exactly what constitutes acceptable giving or how much hospitals must do. (Houghton, 7/25)

A below-the-radar dispute over the mining of patient data and how companies exchange that information is rattling the health tech industry. Electronic health records giant Epic claims that Integritort, which provides analysis of medical records for legal cases, incorrectly accessed its patient data through Carequality, a nonprofit framework for sharing health data. Epic says Integritort retrieved the data by falsely claiming it was for treatment purposes, which made it easier to gain access without a physician’s authorization in violation of Carequality’s rules. (Leonard, 7/25)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Oregon Senator Proposes Criminal Charges And Fines For Rogue Obamacare Agents

Health insurance agents who fraudulently enroll consumers in Affordable Care Act health plans could be subject to criminal charges — and civil penalties of $10,000 to $200,000 — under legislation introduced Wednesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Wyden first promised the bill in May, when he called on federal regulators to do more to combat sketchy Obamacare enrollment schemes. (Appleby, 7/24)

Marketplace health insurers will pay $10.3 billion under the risk-adjustment program for 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Monday. While insurers will transfer 11.5% more to other carriers than they did the previous year, payments are 10.4% less as a share of premiums. (Berryman and Broderick, 7/24)

Insurers like UnitedHealth are profiting off of the Medicare Advantage system, and it’s causing problems for both doctors and patients. (Empinado, 7/25)

When Fred Bedell entered the emergency room on Oct. 12, 2020, he was in the throes of tremendous abdominal pain. The situation was frightening, but Bedell, a 60-year-old father of two, had little reason to doubt that he’d receive anything except excellent care at Florida Lake City Hospital, a 113-bed facility about 60 miles west of Jacksonville. For the past several years, the local chamber of commerce had named it the “Best of the Best.” (Melby, Mosendz, and Buhayar, 7/24)

Americans are more and more likely to get health care not from doctors, but from nurse practitioners. It’s one of the fastest-growing professions in the US — and the number of nurse practitioners in the country is expected to climb 45% by 2032. But training for the booming profession has never been standardized, and some students worry they’re not being set up for success. (Fox, Holder, Lu, and Sugiura, 7/24)

More than 400 nurse practitioners, physician assistants, certified nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists who work at a variety of clinics and hospitals in Duluth-based Essentia Health’s eastern market voted Tuesday to form a union. It is the first time so-called “advanced practice providers” have unionized at Essentia. (Kraker, 7/24)

Healthcare’s staffing crisis shows no sign of slowing in the second half of 2024, with many clinical roles continuing to go unfilled. Healthcare employment has been on the rise in all sectors this year, pushed higher by a surge in ambulatory healthcare services and mounting pressure on facilities to meet staffing minimums. Employers are doing what they can to recruit workers by increasing wages while also turning to technology to improve workforce efficiency. (Devereaux, 7/24)

It’s no secret that UnitedHealth is a colossus: It’s the country’s largest health insurer and the fourth-largest company of any type by revenue, just behind Apple. And thanks to a series of stealthy deals, almost 1 in 10 U.S. doctors — some 90,000 clinicians — now either work for UnitedHealth or are under its influence, more than any major clinic chain or hospital system. (Herman, Bannow, Ross and Lawrence, 7/25)

Gov. Ned Lamont is exploring the possibility of returning the state’s Medicaid program to a model known as managed care, which has garnered a reputation among some Connecticut legislators and advocates for increasing costs and reducing access. (Golvala, 7/25)

Gay and transgender “panic” defenses are no longer viable in Michigan courtrooms under legislation signed Tuesday by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Michigan is the 20th state to outlaw such defenses, which allow individuals accused of violent crimes to receive lesser sentences by arguing that the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity caused them to panic. While gay and trans “panic” defenses — referred to collectively as the LGBTQ “panic” defense — are not freestanding defenses, they are used in conjunction with other legal strategies to reduce the severity of charges or sentencing. (Migdon, 7/24)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: California Speeds Up Indoor Heat Protections Amid Sweltering Summer Weather

Californians working indoors are getting immediate protections from extreme heat as much of the state bakes in triple-digit temperatures this week. California has had heat standards on the books for outdoor workers since 2005, but the state announced Wednesday that a set of rules for indoor workers had been finalized following an expedited review. The state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board approved the regulation last month, but it needed to be vetted for legal compliance. (Young, 7/24)

Maryland's health department rolled out a new tool that can paint a clear image of the opioid crisis. The interactive dashboard allows people to zoom in and see where fatal doses are located and who is impacted the most by the ongoing opioid crisis. The dashboard is a new iteration of the state's previous site. It will be updated monthly rather than every 90 days to track the crisis that is plaguing the state. Right now, Maryland is looking at nearly 2,100 overdose deaths in the past year, with fentanyl as the leading cause. (Davila, 7/24)

Over the course of about a year, a 43-year-old Middle River man called police 62 times, often “rambling” or “speaking in nonsensical speech” about such things as the military infiltrating his home or his neighbors operating a sex trafficking ring involving the Baltimore Ravens. Police described his 911 calls in court documents charging him with making false statements to officers. He was eventually convicted of two such counts and sentenced to two years of supervised probation, with the condition that he undergo mental health treatment. (Mann, 7/25)

The Alzheimer’s Association of Wyoming recently received a more than $15,000 grant from the Wyoming Community Foundation to bring in-person education programs to the southwest and northeast corners of the state. The grant will support programming in Lincoln, Sublette, Sweetwater, Uinta, Crook, Niobrara and Weston counties. (Habermann, 7/23)

Chelsea residents who received a no-strings-attached cash benefit early in the pandemic saw vastly better health outcomes than those who didn’t, a new study found. Researchers said the Chelsea Eats guaranteed income program reduced emergency visits among participants by 27 percent, simply by doling out $400 each month to families between November 2020 and August 2021. (Kohli, 7/24)

Physicians are known to have higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than the general population due to handling patient deaths, medical emergencies, and high workloads, and researchers who examined patterns during the COVID pandemic found that PTSD levels spiked and varied by different groups. (Schnirring, 7/24)

Infectious disease professionals are calling for greater federal funding in the face of new Centers for Disease Contral and Prevention (CDC) data outlining an uptick in antimicrobial-resistant pathogens in hospitals. In a fact sheet published last week, the agency broke down changes in hospital-onset rates for seven resistant infections from 2019 to 2022, updating prior reporting that capped at 2020. (Muoio, 7/22)

Hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who required intensive care unit (ICU) treatment were more likely to acquire infections than those hospitalized with influenza, according to a new study in Scientific Reports. The study was based on outcomes seen among Swedish adults treated with invasive mechanical ventilation due to COVID-19 between January 2020 and March 2022 and those with flu between January 2015 and May 2023 at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. (Soucheray, 7/22)

Levels of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a disabling chronic multisystem illness from an unknown cause, is largely the same in people who were sick with COVID-19 and those who had other acute illness, a team led by researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles reported today. (Schnirring, 7/24)

A cure for an ultrarare disease, progeria, could be on the horizon. The disease speeds up aging in children and dramatically shortens their lives. But, until recently, there was no path toward a highly effective treatment. Now, a small group of academics and government scientists, including Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, is working with no expectation of financial gain to halt progeria in its tracks with an innovative gene editing technique. (Kolata, 7/24)

More than 40 percent of women said they skipped or delayed a screening recommended by a health professional, according to a recent survey by Gallup for the medical technology company Hologic. In the survey of 4,001 adult women across the United States, 90 percent of respondents agreed that it is important to get regular preventive health screenings for cancer, heart disease, sexually transmitted infections and other key health conditions. But 43 percent also said they skipped or delayed a recommended screening, including for breast cancer, cervical cancer and colorectal cancer. (Docter-Loeb, 7/22)

If you think that the concerns of parents and families will always be “abstract” to someone who doesn’t have children, you’re telling on yourself. It’s not simply that, by all accounts, Vice President Kamala Harris has a close, loving relationship with her stepkids. It’s that it’s possible for people who have basic empathy to understand the needs, aspirations and concerns of fellow citizens who aren’t exactly like them — and to commit to their well-being. It actually should be a requirement for presidential candidates to have compassion for people they’ll never meet. ... It should go without saying, but: Having children doesn’t necessarily make you a better person. (Jessica Grose, 7/23)

The one instinct that JD Vance and the rest of the New Right share is a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality — or what the New Right calls “gender ideology.” Overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains is one of the most obvious unifying threads of this varied movement, and Donald Trump’s choice of Vance anoints and entrenches it into the culture-war side of the MAGA movement. (Laura K. Field, 7/24)

For months, I have wished that I could have Biden in my exam room, not as the president of the United States, but as a patient in my geriatrics clinic. Instead, watching from afar as he insisted on running, I wondered if his doctors were talking to him honestly about his concerning symptoms, and his disappointing odds of fulfilling the requirements of the office for another term. I hoped that if they were discussing his future, they were pointing out the advantages of taking charge in this situation, even when no available option was Biden’s ideal. But, given what they and the president said in public before he ended his campaign, I worried that little of this was happening. Despite the aging U.S. population, few clinicians are trained to care for aging bodies, much less to discuss the developmental stages of elderhood and identity-threatening realities of later life. (Louise Aronson, 7/24)

The surge in congenital syphilis isn’t due to the infection’s many disguises; it’s because of failures of our health system and safety net. According to the C.D.C., nine out of 10 congenital syphilis cases in 2022 were preventable; lack of prenatal testing and timely treatment were the most common culprits, intersecting with social ills such as poverty, homelessness, substance use and incarceration. Because of systemic inequities, Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Black communities are hardest hit; 1 in 155 Native American births were affected by congenital syphilis in 2022. (Ina Park, 7/25)

We know health disparities exist, but we don’t collect enough data on them—and small sample size is used as an excuse. Time for that to end. (Tran T. Doan, 7/24)

It takes years for most people with a rare disease to learn what is ailing them. Their symptoms may be crystal clear, but the cause isn’t. Efforts by the Department of Justice — an agency not known for its medical expertise — will make things even harder for the millions of Americans, half of them children, with one of these diseases. (Emil D. Kakkis, 7/25)