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A storm has descended on millions of minority Americans. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban has ripped away their hard-won shelter of accessible care, dealing immense harm far beyond college campuses. Small hometowns like mine in rural Arkansas will absorb this blow along with Black and Hispanic communities in the poorest city blocks and parts of town tourists avoid. Many aspiring doctors who understand the pain in these communities and who are called to return home and tend to their own will be denied the opportunity to pursue a medical degree and serve their communities. (Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, 6/29)

Now that federal health officials have laid out a plan to switch out the bivalent vaccine for a new booster this fall, readers have many questions about timing. (Leana S. Wen, 6/29)

Patients and family members, communities throughout the country, doctors, nurses and providers are all grappling with the reality of the depletion of the physician workforce in our nation’s health care system. The workforce shortage has been increasing since before the COVID-19 pandemic – accelerating at an even more alarming rate thereafter. (Sens. Bob Menendez, John Boozman, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins, 6/29)

Before I had a name for what ailed my body, I thought of myself as dehydrated and out of shape. I believed that the physical discomfort I’d experienced for years — numbness, pain, tingling and pins-and-needles sensations throughout my body — must be traceable to a cause of my own making. (Sara J. Winston, 6/29)

It's been a year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped away the right to an abortion from millions of people across the country. (Kristal Knight, 6/29)

In 1983, I flew home from college to be with my mother as she woke up from a mastectomy. She opted out of breast reconstruction, choosing to “go flat” instead. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 and had bilateral mastectomies, I had more reconstruction options than my mother did. (Lisa D. T. Rice, 6/30)

The systematic effort to use the power of government to marginalize transgender people and deny young people health care services based on ideology and against scientific consensus in states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana and Florida has been rebuffed by jurists in the last several weeks. (David Plazas, 6/29)