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An incapacitated woman who gave birth after being a patient at an Arizona health care facility for more than two decades had been raped repeatedly and may have been impregnated before, her lawyers say. In documents filed Wednesday, the 29-year-old woman's attorneys cite a medical exam in alleging that she suffered multiple sexual assaults. The exam found that the birth of a baby boy last December was "a non-nulliparous event," the documents say, meaning she may have been pregnant before. (Romo, 5/23)

They proposed taxing soda, banning Big Gulps, prohibiting in-store discounts on soft drinks, banishing them from the front of convenience stores and slapping safety warning labels on all sugary beverages from Coca-Cola and sports drinks to sweet tea and chocolate milk. The soda industry responded by drastically ramping up its lobbying in the statehouse, more than tripling the amount it spent in the first three months of this year, compared with the same period last year. Now, as the Legislature hits the session’s halfway point, three of the anti-soda measures have fizzled. (Rosenhall, 5/23)

The federal government in recent months has banned transgender people from joining the military and made plans to roll back protections that could lead to insurance companies and doctors refusing to provide them health care. Colorado, meanwhile, is heading the opposite direction. ... the state Division of Insurance added a new regulation to the books that makes it against the law for an insurance company in Colorado to deny coverage for transgender care deemed medically necessary by a doctor, including hormones and surgeries. (Brown, 5/23)

SPIRIT serves people who cannot get help at the emergency room because their conditions, while life-altering, don’t rise to the level of life-threatening — at least not yet. Across the state and the country, charity groups, hospitals and community clinics are working to try to connect these patients to complex care that would otherwise be unattainable. For some, it means months — or years — of waiting for help. (Caiola, 5/24)

Exeter Health Resources, Wentworth-Douglass Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital said Thursday their boards have agreed to a proposed merger agreement and that the parties have filed with the New Hampshire Charitable Trusts Unit, based on the letter of intent signed in May 2018. The agreement calls for the formation of a new, New Hampshire-based, regional, not-for-profit that will serve as the parent of both Exeter Health Resources and Wentworth-Douglass Hospital and will be part of the Massachusetts General Hospital family, according to a release. (5/23)

The deadline is awfully close. By law, June 1 is the day for most of the state’s hospitals, physician’s offices, mental health providers and others to be hooked into the state’s growing health information exchange, known as NC Health Connex. But for many small physicians’ offices and mental health providers that deadline was looking more like a dead end. If they were not able to get online or at least sign a participation agreement that obligated them to have an electronic health record system and be connected with NC Health Connex by June 2020, they would be unable to submit bills to state-funded health care systems, such as Medicaid and the health plan for state employees. (Hoban, 5/23)

Springfield, Ill.-based Memorial Health System is set to take on Decatur (Ill.) Memorial Hospital, the organizations announced Thursday. The 300-bed Decatur would be the second-largest hospital in Memorial's network, which includes Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Passavant Area Hospital in Jacksonville, Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Lincoln and Taylorville Memorial Hospital in Taylorville, as well as Memorial Physician Services, Memorial Behavioral Health and Memorial Home Services. (Kacik, 5/23)

The rural Tennessee hospital purchased by a struggling Florida lab company last year is veering dangerously toward closure. West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Rennova Health bought Jamestown (Tenn.) Regional Medical Center from Community Health Systems in June 2018. It was a perplexing deal given Rennova had reported a $51 million net loss from continuing operations in 2017 and was being sued by landlords, contractors and employees over unpaid bills and wages. (Bannow, 5/23)

Drivers across the country are more likely to die on rural roads than city streets — but in these states, rural crash deaths are even more common than the national average, a new study finds. South Carolina had the highest rate of rural road deaths of any state in 2017, followed by California in the No. 2 spot, and then Arizona, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Kansas, Oregon and North Carolina, according to a report released on Wednesday by TRIP, an industry-funded transportation research nonprofit. (Gilmour, 5/23)

For almost five hours, the infant girl remained strapped in her car seat, forgotten in a day-care center van that was parked in the sun on a 91-degree day. According to authorities, the 4-month-old was picked up from her home on Wednesday morning along with other children headed to the Ewing’s Love and Hope Preschool and Academy in Jacksonville, Fla. But when her mother called at about 1 p.m. to make arrangements for her children, day-care employees realized the baby had never been checked in. (Epstein, 5/23)

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em — but not on the beach in New Jersey this summer. Smoking and vaping will be banned on nearly every public beach in the state this summer under tougher new restrictions. Nonsmokers are rejoicing over the ban, which also applies to public parks. But some smokers are feeling discriminated against by the law, which took effect in January. (Parry, 5/23)

Officials from the California Department of Justice on Thursday visited two of Los Angeles County’s troubled juvenile halls — a sign that conditions inside the facilities are drawing the attention of state monitors. The officials toured Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where staff complaints and damage caused by detainees were the subject of a story in The Times on Sunday. The officials spent the morning at the facility with detention supervisors and county lawyers before heading to the Central Juvenile Hall, northeast of downtown L.A., about lunchtime. (Stiles, 5/23)

The toll – business and personal – had been high for the 41 people at Paradise Medical Group: They had lost the largest building on their small campus to the fire. The hospital where the group’s 12 physicians regularly saw patients was ravaged by fire and closed. (Anderson, 5/24)

After admitting they failed to adequately screen prisoners for the highly contagious disease, Florida corrections officials are challenging a federal judge’s order that found the agency was “deliberately indifferent” to inmates infected with hepatitis C. The state Department of Corrections last week filed a notice of appeal at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the latest move in a drawn-out legal battle over the state’s handling of thousands of inmates with the liver-damaging disease. (Kam, 5/23)

A federal health agency says backyard chickens and ducks are the likely source of a multi-state salmonella outbreak that has sickened 52 people, including at least one person in Michigan. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) saidthat there have been 52 reported cases across 21 states. Five people have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported. Those who became ill, the CDC said, reported being in contact with backyard poultry such as chicks and ducklings. More than a quarter of those infected are children under 5 years old. (Selasky, 5/24)