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President Joe Biden and congressional leaders announced Tuesday that they have reached an agreement on this fiscal year’s final set of spending bills. Now, the question is how fast lawmakers can get the bills passed to avoid a partial government shutdown. While Biden said he’ll sign the bill package as soon as he receives it, time is running short. Legislative staff needs time to finish the bill text, an arduous task. The House has a rule that lawmakers get 72 hours to review a bill before voting. And the Senate has never been known for its ability to sprint. Meanwhile, funding for several key agencies expires at midnight Friday. (Freking, 3/19)

A healthcare package that would have advanced pharmacy benefit manager legislation and other healthcare priorities including enhanced community health center funding will not move alongside the next round of federal appropriations. Committee leaders who hoped to build a legislative package around bipartisan PBM measures and other popular items were unable to come to agreement, and Senate and House leadership declined to add healthcare legislation to the fiscal 2024 government funding bill they are expected to release Tuesday or Wednesday. (McAuliff, 3/19)

A successful global AIDS program that was in limbo for months got a temporary reprieve this week when congressional negotiators agreed to a one-year renewal in the next government funding package. (Knight and Sullivan, 3/20)

More than one in four US-designated essential medicines are considered “very high risk” by the military because they are dependent on key ingredients from China or unknown sources, according to a report posted by a bipartisan group of lawmakers. In a letter to Pentagon leadership sent Monday, the group led by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned of the nation’s dependency on foreign countries for crucial medicines. (Griffin and Edney, 3/19)

A pregnant Arizona lawmaker who revealed in a speech at the state Senate that she was planning to get an abortion says she wanted to share with her colleagues and the public the practical effects of abortion restrictions passed over the years. Democratic Sen. Eva Burch of Mesa told fellow lawmakers in a floor speech Monday that she was going to get an abortion because her pregnancy is no longer viable. The first-term lawmaker, who previously worked as a nurse practitioner at a women’s health clinic, described a “rough journey” with fertility and recounted a miscarriage she had suffered. (Billeaud, 3/19)

A Democratic group that works to expand party control within state Capitols is arguing in a new memo that state legislatures are the “arbiters of reproductive freedom.” Heather Williams, president of Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), said in a new memo that “we are always just one Supreme Court decision away from a state law being catapulted to the national stage—like the Mississippi abortion ban that Dobbs upheld.” (Vakil, 3/20)

The first underlying factor is that travel out of state for abortion has gone up, offsetting some of the newer restrictions in states with bans. More than 160,000 people crossed state lines to end pregnancies in 2023, per Guttmacher, almost double the number who did so in 2020.This isn’t to say the burden of state restrictions has been offset. “Even if people can travel, doing so comes with significant financial and logistical cost,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, the lead researcher at Guttmacher, told me. “And it’s only been possible because there’s been a lot of support from folks like abortion funds, and we don’t know how sustainable that [funding] will be long-term.” (Cohen, 3/20)

Medical providers who work for religiously affiliated hospitals or other health care centers and provide counseling or referrals on reproductive care would be protected from dismissal, suspension, or penalties under a bill that is being considered by the legislature’s Public Health Committee. (Carlesso, 3/19)

With a stroke of a pen Tuesday morning, Gov. Kathy Hochul guaranteed birth control access for women in New York. "It's a new day. You now have access, easy access to the contraception you need to suit your needs because it is your body and it is your choice," Hochul said. As of Tuesday, all pharmacies across the state are allowed to dispense three types of contraception: The pill, ring or patch. Women in New York, or even those just visiting New York, can purchase up to a year's supply without visiting a doctor. (Moore, 3/19)

At a Republican retreat in West Virginia last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said his party would “protect and preserve” access to IVF. Yet three months prior, he championed a federal law that would’ve deemed a fertilized egg a person, effectively banning the practice. The backpedaling came in response to national furor over an Alabama case that prompted fertility clinics in the state to halt IVF procedures. (Brown, Butler, and Mekelburg, 3/19)

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent years trying to unravel the details of Down syndrome: What happens inside the womb, how the genetic disorder alters the formation of neurons, and what specific processes affect brain development. The work can’t proceed without studying fetal tissue. (Goldhill, 3/20)

Lately, the development of new COVID-19 treatments has slowed to a drip, prompting the guideline group to rethink its efforts. "I don't know that there was a perfect moment [to end it], but ... the frequency of calls that we needed to have began to decrease, and then on occasion we would be canceling one of our regularly scheduled calls," says Lane. "It's probably six months ago we started talking about — What will be the end? How do we end it in a way that we don't create a void?" (Huang, 3/19)

The Department of Transportation (DOT) hasn't created a national aviation preparedness plan for infectious disease outbreaks, despite a 2015 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendation to do so, according to a new report on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. When tasked with identifying pandemic lessons for the report, the GAO reviewed more than 20 of its previous reports and documents from offices of inspectors general and aviation stakeholders and interviewed officials from the DOT and the Department of the Treasury. (Van Beusekom, 3/19)

COVID-19 is no longer among the top five causes of death for Wyoming residents, according to newly published Department of Health statistics for 2023. The coronavirus had been a leading cause of death for Wyomingites ever since 2020. (Victor, 3/19)

At times, it feels like ages ago, almost like another lifetime, while other times it’s like it happened just yesterday. In just a few days, everything changed: Streets emptied, schools and businesses closed and supermarket shelves were stripped bare. On March 19, 2020, amid the escalating threat posed by the novel coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a bold call to action, imploring all Californians to stay at home. (Vaziri, 3/19)

People with excessively flexible joints may be at heightened risk of long Covid and persistent fatigue, research suggests. Hypermobility is where some or all of a person’s joints have an unusually large range of movement due to differences in the structure of their connective tissues that support, protect and give structure to organs, joints and other tissues. (Geddes, 3/19)

A new study based on outcomes seen at European intensive care units (ICUs) suggests higher is not better when it comes to targets for supplemental oxygenation levels for COVID-19 patients experiencing low oxygen, or hypoxia. (Soucheray, 3/19)

COVID-19 vaccines were found to cut the risk of heart failure by up to 55% and blood clots by up to 78% following COVID infection, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal. The positive health effects lasted for up to a year and were more pronounced right after getting vaccinated. (Benadjaoud, 3/19)

Healthcare’s lack of investment in cybersecurity is in the spotlight as the Change Healthcare breach continues to disrupt the industry. ... Cybersecurity professionals are sounding the alarm on future attacks if healthcare organizations don't start putting more financial resources into protecting their data. “The landscape has changed. The threats are higher,” said David Ting, chief technology officer and founder of cybersecurity company Tausight. “We should be going to DEFCON 2.” (Turner, 3/19) 

Federal officials and industry executives have known for years that the U.S. health-care system was one of the critical industries most vulnerable to hacking but failed to make the improvements that might have stopped attacks like the one that has crippled pharmacists and other medical providers for three weeks. The danger was obvious in 2021, when ransomware gangs struck hospitals already overwhelmed by the covid-19 pandemic, forcing some to divert incoming emergency patients to other facilities and potentially contributing to deadly treatment delays. Menn, 3/19)

UnitedHealth Group appears to be offering some providers more substantial loans in the wake of the cyberattack on Change Healthcare, according to three doctors who each saw their advances increase up to seven figures. (Trang and Bannow, 3/19)

UnitedHealth Group's Change Healthcare has restored some of its system a month after a catastrophic cyberattack crippled it and much of the nation's healthcare infrastructure, but the recovery process is only just beginning. Other companies offering revenue cycle management are gaining traction amid the Change outage, filling in service gaps left by a dominant player that likely won't be operating normally for weeks. (Hudson and Berryman, 3/19)

The Federal Trade Commission is sending refunds to consumers it says bought into fake health plans falsely marketed by Benefytt Technologies as comprehensive health insurance or an Obamacare plan under the Affordable Care Act. Benefytt, operating under various names such as Health Insurance Innovations, used aggressive marketing and fraudulent websites in a scheme to lure consumers in search of health insurance into buying bogus policies with high monthly fees, according to the FTC's August 2022 complaint. (Lee, 3/19)

UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Mount Sinai Health System agreed to a new multiyear contract that will prevent thousands of New Yorkers from losing access to their in-network doctors. The agreement reached Tuesday immediately restores access to the health system’s hospitals for people with employer-sponsored and individual plans, including the Oxford Health Plan, according to a statement on the UnitedHealth website. (Denham, 3/20)

For the last decade, workers at two cash-strapped safety-net hospitals in Rhode Island have been trying to care for thousands of patients while answering to an out-of-state, private-equity firm owner with a history of failing to pay the bills. Now, they’re faced with a new kind of pressure: figuring out whether being purchased by a private foundation will make matters better, or worse. Hospitals owned by private-equity firms are struggling nationwide as the companies prioritize profits over patients. (Gagosz, 3/19)

While standing in front of a packed room of hospital workers and executives, CharterCARE chief executive Jeffrey H. Liebman said that when the two hospitals he leads in Rhode Island went up for sale, there was only one organization that came forward that could take them over. The Centurion Foundation “was the only viable candidate,” said Liebman during a public information meeting on Tuesday night at Rhode Island College regarding the sale of Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, which are managed by CharterCARE Health Partners. (Gagosz, 3/19)

Health insurers are pulling back from an accountable care organization pilot program intended to reduce costs for fee-for-service Medicare enrollees amid a surprise spike in medical costs and unfavorable regulatory changes. Alignment Health, Centene and NeueHealth scaled back their participation in ACO REACH this year, while companies such as Cityblock Health and Clover Health withdrew from the model altogether. (Tepper, 3/19)

Investors are starting to back startups that offer privacy and security services to bolster health AI products already on the market while they wait for crucial safety and privacy regulations to take shape. (Ravindranath, 3/18)

When Joel Bervell thought about professionalism as an undergrad, he thought of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Specifically, he thought about how residents on the show were expected to be, although often were not: on time, prepared for their cases and respectful to everyone around them. “That was the only standard that I had of what it meant to be a doctor — especially someone like me, who doesn’t come from a family of doctors,” said Mr. Bervell, 28, a fourth-year medical student at Washington State University. Mr. Bervell, who is Ghanaian American, is one of the first Black medical students at the medical college, which opened in 2017. (Gross, 3/19)

Opponents and proponents of Governor Gavin Newsom’s Prop. 1 mental health bond measure are seeking to correct rejected ballots from the March 5 primary — usually rejected due to a voter’s missing signature or a mismatched signature — as the fate of Prop. 1 hangs by a razor-thin margin. Prop. 1 was backed by 50.1% of voters and opposed by 49.9%, according to the March 16 update from the secretary of state’s office. ... The opposition campaign estimates that upwards of 110,000 disqualified ballots could be corrected and counted. (Harter, 3/19)

Alameda County health officials alerted the public Tuesday about a possible measles exposure at a San Leandro restaurant earlier this month. Health officials said the possible exposure occurred at Sons of Liberty Alehouse in San Leandro between the hours of 4:45 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on March 9. (Parker, 3/19)

Leaders in El Dorado County and the city of Placerville have found themselves at the center of a lawsuit filed against them by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Jennifer Bunshoft, representing the California Department of Public Health. The state is suing the county and city governments after both recently banned drug needle exchange programs.  (Sharp, 3/19)

Colorado lawmakers heard powerful testimony Tuesday about a bill aimed at saving lives. The measure would regulate a food preservative that is lethal in its concentrated form. The preservative, sodium nitrite, is primarily used - in a diluted form - by meat processing companies. But in recent years, it has also been increasingly used - in its pure form - as a suicide agent. (Boyd, 3/19)

Laurie Ayala works out of an office deep in Northwestern Medicine's Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, IL. Whenever the small, black landline phone on her desk rings, she answers. This phone is home base for Illinois' Perinatal Syphilis Warmline. Launched in November 2023, the phone line is designed to answer questions about perinatal syphilis from medical professionals across the state. ... There were roughly 4,000 babies born with syphilis in the United States in 2022 – in 2012, that number was 335. (Khera, Kwong, and Carlson, 3/20)

The Rhode Island Senate on Tuesday voted 28 to 7 for a bill requiring the safe storage of firearms, giving a boost to the gun bill that appears most likely to pass this legislative session. Senator Pamela J. Lauria, the Barrington Democrat who introduced the bill, emphasized that guns are the number one killer of children in the United States. “That bears repeating: not cancer, not motor vehicle accidents, but firearms are the number one killer of our children,” she said. (Fitzpatrick, 3/19)

The University of South Florida is preparing to launch a new degree program to train educational specialists in school psychology, amid what one national organization says is a shortage of psychologists at schools. (3/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirements Costing Taxpayers Millions Despite Low Enrollment

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s plan for a conservative alternative to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has cost taxpayers at least $26 million so far, with more than 90% going toward administrative and consulting costs rather than medical care for low-income people. Kemp’s Georgia Pathways to Coverage offers government health insurance to people earning up to the federal poverty level — $15,060 for an individual adult — if they can document that they’re working, in school, or performing other qualifying activities. (Miller and Rayasam, 3/20)

A leading cancer research organization released a first-of-its-kind study outlining how LGBTQ+ individuals face an "elevated prevalence" of certain risk factors linked to the disease. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), there are certain "minority stress" factors associated with LGBTQ+ individuals, such as smoking, excess body weight, HIV and access to gender transition surgical procedures that exacerbate their vulnerability to developing cancer. (Joseph, 3/19)

This year, states have tried to prevent transgender people from using public bathrooms and from being able to update identity documents like driver’s licenses. Legislators in multiple states are attempting to rewrite state code to define sex based on reproductive capacity, and to exclude gender identity from discrimination protections. (Rummler, 3/19)

As Indiana officials struggled to contain an outbreak of HIV among people who injected drugs, then-Gov. Mike Pence reluctantly followed the urgings of public health officials and cleared the way for an overwhelmed county to hand out clean syringes. ... After it rolled out in 2015, the percentage of injection drug users there who said they shared needles dropped from 74% to 22%. Within a few years, the number of new HIV infections plummeted by 96% and new cases of hepatitis C fell by 76%. (Alpert Reyes, 3/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Watch: Many Americans Are Unaware Of HIV Prevention Medication

Some Americans mistakenly believe medication to prevent HIV transmission through sex is just for certain groups such as gay men, but anyone who’s at risk for contracting HIV through sex could benefit. (Gounder, 3/20)

A new, digital stethoscope uses AI to help doctors detect heart valve problems. ... Only about 40-percent of murmurs can be detected during a physical exam by a clinician with a regular stethoscope. But this new stethoscope, developed by EKO Health, and the new technology with it are changing that. (Marshall, 3/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Needle Pain Is A Big Problem For Kids. One California Doctor Has A Plan

Almost all new parents go through it: the distress of hearing their child scream at the doctor’s office. They endure the emotional torture of having to hold their child down as the clinician sticks them with one vaccine after another. “The first shots he got, I probably cried more than he did,” said Remy Anthes, who was pushing her 6-month-old son, Dorian, back and forth in his stroller in Oakland, California. (Dembosky, 3/20)

The two patients had both died young from heart problems. When researchers looked at their DNA, they spotted another commonality: The two shared a particular version of a gene that helps the heart beat. Perhaps, the researchers thought, the variant could explain their heart conditions. (Joseph, 3/20)

People aged 60 and older in the U.S. reported high levels of well-being compared to younger people. In fact, the United States ranks in the top 10 countries for happiness in this age group. Conversely, there's a decline in happiness among younger adolescents and young adults in the U.S. "The report finds there's a dramatic decrease in the self-reported well-being of people aged 30 and below," says report author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science, and the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University. (Aubrey, 3/20)

“Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our customers and crew members,” a Trader Joe’s representative said in an email, adding that when a product doesn’t meet TJ’s “stringent food safety expectations,” the company moves swiftly to recall it. (Petrow-Cohen, 3/19)

Approximately 95% of nonorganic strawberries, leafy greens such as spinach and kale, collard and mustard greens, grapes, peaches and pears tested by the United States government contained detectable levels of pesticides, according to the 2024 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. (LaMotte, 3/20)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Listen To The Latest '�鶹Ů�� Health News Minute'

“Health Minute” brings original health care and health policy reporting from the �鶹Ů�� Health News newsroom to the airwaves each week. (3/19)

Low-dose aspirin led to a reduction in liver fat among patients with metabolic-associated liver disease, a small study out of Boston found. (Cueto, 3/19)

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it will buy Canadian drug developer Fusion Pharmaceuticals Inc for $2 billion in cash as the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker bets on next-generation cancer treatments. The deal gives AstraZeneca a foothold in the radiopharmaceutical drugs market, which has seen increasing investor interest since 2021 when data from Novartis' treatment showed that the drug extended survival for prostate cancer patients. (Shabong and Mishra, 3/19)

Bankrupt drugmaker Endo International said on Tuesday a U.S. Bankruptcy Court has approved its restructuring plan and related opioid settlements to emerge from bankruptcy, which began in 2022. ... Endo had last month agreed to pay up to $465 million over a decade to resolve over $7 billion in claims for purported tax debts, a criminal investigation into the company's opioid marketing and the federal government's possible overpayment for its medications. (3/19)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first therapy for a rare and devastating condition called metachromatic leukodystrophy, which typically kills affected children before they turn 7. The one-time treatment, called Lenmeldy, takes stem cells from someone with MLD and uses a harmless virus to insert working copies of a faulty gene. The repaired cells are then infused back to the patient, where they begin to produce an enzyme that’s lacking in children who have the disease. (Goodman, 3/19)

Powerful weight loss medications aren’t reaching the people who need them most, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. ... “Obesity has been a long-standing clinical and public health change and it’s growing in scope,” said Dr. Chiadi Ndumele, director of obesity and cardiometabolic research in the division of cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, who presented the findings Tuesday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. (Miller and Kopf, 3/19)

We’re now well into the 21st century but, incredibly, medical research, care and investment still default to the male body. People typically think of women’s health as sexual and reproductive health, but the majority of the global women’s health burden is caused by conditions that affect women differently or disproportionately. These are just some of the findings in a new analysis by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute. (Megan Greenfield and Lucy Perez, 3/19)  

We’ve all seen the videos, in commercials or online, of crash testing. In a testing facility, a car hurtles towards a barrier with crash test dummies inside as engineers test for the impact of a crash. But there is a problem that we likely would not notice at first glance: these dummies and tests are based on men’s bodies, and men’s bodies only. It might seem unusual to think of an inanimate dummy as male, but it’s a basic physical representation of the way men’s bodies are shaped, the way weight and muscle are distributed, their average height. All this is fine for testing how men might fare in a car crash. But it’s extremely dangerous to women. (Susan Molinari and Beth Brooke, 3/19)

A new study suggests that the nursing shortage is easing, but that doesn’t mean the health care system can stop worrying about retaining new and experienced clinicians. One potential solution: paid sabbaticals for nurses and other health care workers. If professors get sabbaticals to refresh and rejuvenate to sustain their academic productivity, why not frontline health care workers? (Diana J. Mason, 3/20)

The manufacturing tax credits could be the boost that formula brands need to buy or build their own manufacturing facilities rather than relying on contract manufacturers such as Perrigo, which also makes private-label formulas for chain stores. Those credits might also encourage companies with existing factories to build excess production capacity so they could scale manufacturing up quickly in the event of a shortage. (Alyssa Rosenberg, 3/20)

There is a war brewing between insurers and providers over who can get these drugs, and not even Oprah Winfrey will be able to broker a resolution. True to her brand, she did not try. What Oprah did try to do is finally write the ending to a story about bodies that she has been writing for almost 40 years. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” went into national syndication in 1986. I was 10 years old. That means I have been in a psychosocial relationship with Oprah’s weight-loss struggles for longer than I have been an adult. (Tressie McMillan Cottom, 3/20)