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The Trump administration announced on Friday that it will bar organizations that provide abortion referrals from receiving federal family planning money, a step that could strip millions of dollars from Planned Parenthood and direct it toward religiously-based, anti-abortion groups. The new federal rule is almost certain to be challenged in court. Clinics will be able to talk to patients about abortion, but not where they can get one. And clinics will no longer have to counsel women on all reproductive options, including abortion, a change that will make anti-abortion providers eligible for funding. (Belluck, 2/22)

The new regulation was announced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of Title X, a government family planning program that serves about 4 million people. The program currently subsidizes health centers such as those run by the non-profit Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception, health screenings and abortions. Planned Parenthood serves about 41 percent of Title X patients and receives up to $60 million a year in federal funds for family planning services. (2/22)

The change means federally funded family planning clinics can no longer refer a patient for abortion and must maintain a “clear physical and financial separation” between services funded by the government and any organization that provides abortions or abortion referrals. Groups receiving money under the Title X program, which serves an estimated 4 million low-income women, were already prohibited from performing abortions with those funds. The changes, which opponents vowed to challenge, were celebrated by social conservatives who oppose abortion and helped elect President Trump. Health and Human Services Department officials have said they were necessary to ensure transparency and the legal and ethical use of taxpayer funds. (Cha, 2/22)

This could disqualify many of Planned Parenthood’s 600 centers across the country, which receives about a quarter of Title X funds annually to provide reproductive health and preventive services to low-income women. “Planned Parenthood cannot participate in a program that would force our health care providers to compromise our ethics,” President Leana Wen said Friday, when asked by The Hill if Planned Parenthood would continue applying for the funding. (Hellmann, 2/22)

Kaiser Health News: HHS Finalizes Rule Seeking To Expel Planned Parenthood From Family Planning Program

None of the funds provided for Title X services may be used for abortion. That has been true since the program was created in 1970. But abortion opponents have for decades complained that since many Planned Parenthood affiliates that receive Title X support also provide abortion, the federal family planning money can be improperly commingled with funds used for the procedure. (Rovner, 2/22)

Title X will instead steer more funding toward clinics that discourage women from seeking abortions. In a release following the rule’s publication, HHS officials said the changes are designed to protect providers who want to offer family-planning services but refuse, on the basis of conscience, to receive federal funding that requires them to make referrals for abortion counseling. Antiabortion groups cheered the move, arguing that the Title X program has long helped to indirectly subsidize abortions by supporting clinics that offer them. (Hackman, 2/22)

Critics of the new policy, which is bound to be litigated in federal court, say it would amount to a "domestic gag rule" that prohibits health care providers from fully counseling their patients on their reproductive choices. Abortion rights groups have already sued the Trump administration over the way grant funding under the program is being distributed, arguing the criteria improperly stress abstinence over access to all FDA-approved forms of contraception. Several state officials, including Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, have announced an intent to sue over the new policy. (Ollstein, 2/22)

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said he intends to sue over the rule. "Pennsylvanians deserve and depend on comprehensive healthcare services and basic information from doctors they trust," said Shapiro. "I will take swift legal action to prevent this attack on Pennsylvanians’ access to healthcare.” Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington also indicated in a statement Friday that litigation is possible. (Raman, 2/22)

"I am committed to fighting the implementation of this rule," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who leads the House's health care appropriations subcommittee. “We’re in the majority now and we have a lot of people in key positions,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), who chairs the contraception and family planning task force of the House Pro Choice Caucus, speaking about Democrats' broader reproductive rights agenda. “We’re going to interject ourselves into the appropriations process.” But in the face of a divided government, both sides admit the next two years will largely be a fight to preserve the status quo and rally their bases on the divisive issue ahead of the 2020 election. (Ollstein, 2/22)

Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness. Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling Medicare for all before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item. They have hired a top lieutenant in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to spearhead the effort. And their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care. (Pear, 2/23)

"Medicare-for-all" can mean different things to different people. For some, it's a single government-run health insurance plan for the whole country. To others, it's giving consumers a choice to buy into Medicare or keep their private insurance. But whatever the form, the proposals are built on the premise that health insurance should be a guaranteed right. (Alonso-Zaldivar, 2/22)

Bernie Sanders is back, but one of his signature policies never left. In 2015, he introduced Medicare-for-all to many Democrats for the first time. Since Sanders' first run for president, that type of single-payer health care system has become a mainstream Democratic proposal. Last week, Sanders launched his second presidential campaign, amid a field of presidential candidates who are trying to figure out how to position themselves around the policy. (Kurtzleben, 2/25)

Democrats say they broadly agree about addressing problems like climate change, health care, infrastructure and immigration. Where they differ is the scale of the solution. ... Health care is a key example. At the request of the CPC, [House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John] Yarmuth has agreed to hold hearings on Medicare for all in the spring. He is also planning hearings on the economic cost of climate change. Even if the 2020 budget doesn’t include Medicare for all in its entirety, progressives want it to carve out a path forward. (Elis, 2/24)

UnitedHealth Group, the giant health insurance company, on Friday lost its case to prevent a former executive from working at the new health care venture formed by three powerful corporations, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. A federal judge in Boston denied UnitedHealth’s request to have the executive, David William Smith, immediately stop working. Mr. Smith was an executive at Optum, a unit of UnitedHealth, and it accused him of taking corporate secrets to what it claimed was a competitor. Mr. Smith has denied any wrongdoing. (Abelson, 2/22)

The decision by U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf in Boston came in a lawsuit closely watched in the industry for clues about the future plans of the venture, which was announced in January 2018 with a goal of lowering healthcare costs. UnitedHealth's Optum unit had sought a court order blocking David Smith from working at the venture, saying he could share trade secrets that would give it a competitive advantage. (2/22)

The case has received disproportionate attention for a fight nominally over one employee’s contract because the hearings have shed new light on the secretive health care venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase in 2018. Some experts in the field believe the venture may be one of the earliest and most important forays by a tech company into the health insurance market. (Sheridan, 2/22)

On Friday, the judge issued a stay in the case, writing in his order that "if the parties agree to a resolution to their dispute, they shall promptly inform the court and this case will be dismissed." "If and when the arbitrator issues a decision," Wolf wrote, "the party that did not prevail shall promptly report whether it or he intends to appeal the decision to this court." (Snowbeck, 2/22)

In a medical emergency, you may have a surprisingly difficult time finding a bed in a hospital. This is because elective admissions — that is, patients whose hospital stays have been scheduled in advance — take priority over emergencies. Such a preference for elective admissions might be unexpected, as emergency patients are, by definition, emergencies. But elective patients have attributes that make them financially attractive. They arrive promptly in the morning; they are well-insured; and they undergo invasive procedures that represent a significant revenue stream for hospitals. (Klasco and Wolfe, 2/24)

For many years, the battle cry of healthcare cost warriors was, “Eliminate all those wasteful services.” More recently that evolved to, “Pay providers based on value rather than volume.” But there were always those who insisted the real problem was, “It's the high prices, stupid.” Now policymakers and experts who favor attacking price increases have gained momentum, with both congressional Democrats and the Trump administration pushing price-setting proposals. (Meyer, 2/23)

Members of Modern Healthcare's CEO Power Panel say mergers and acquisitions may be losing their allure for health system leaders. Only three of the 24 health system CEOs who took the survey said M&A will be their primary growth strategy in 2019. Ben Isgur, the leader of PwC's Health Research Institute, said big mergers can be followed by years of integration and inward focus, which could explain why systems might keep a low profile this year. The survey results also show finances may slide in 2019, but CEOs insist it's happening for good reason. (Bannow, 2/23)

There’s no dispute that a $48.9 billion merger announced in 2015 between health insurers Anthem Inc. and Cigna Corp. imploded two years later over antitrust concerns. Now, the question is whether one owes the other billions for the deal’s failure. A Delaware judge will start the process of deciding that pricey dispute Monday in a trial of dueling lawsuits by Anthem and Cigna over the merger meltdown. (Feeley and McLaughlin, 2/23)

In the most high-profile congressional vote on gun control in years, House Democrats are set to pass a bipartisan measure this week that mandates federal background checks on all gun sales, including private transactions. House Democrats have also scheduled a vote on legislation to extend the deadline for federal background checks from three business days to as many as 20. The legislation is designed to close the “Charleston Loophole,” which allowed white supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, to buy a gun despite pending felony drug charges against him. (Bresnahan, 2/25)

The Moms group supports proposals to prohibit convicted domestic abusers from possessing guns. It also seeks to repeal the state “campus carry’’ bill, which allows people with firearms permits to carry concealed guns onto public college and university campuses. The group is also playing defense, working to defeat legislation, House Bill 2, that would allow “permitless carry’’ in Georgia. (Miller, 2/24)

In what is likely to be their first public use of subpoena power since taking over the U.S. House of Representatives in January, Democrats were set to vote on Tuesday on subpoenaing documents on the Trump administration's migrant family separation policy. If approved, the subpoenas by the House Oversight Committee would show Democrats beginning to invoke the investigative clout they obtained when voters in November handed them majority control of the House and took it away from Republicans. (Landay and Hosenball, 2/23)

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed. (Schechner and Secada, 2/22)

Several phone apps are sending sensitive user data, including health information, to Facebook without users' consent, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. An analytics tool called "App Events" allows app developers to record user activity and report it back to Facebook, even if the user isn't on Facebook, according to the report. One example detailed by the Journal shows how a woman would track her period and ovulation using an app from Flo Health. After she enters when she last had her period, Facebook software in the app would send along data, such as whether the user may be ovulating. (2/22)

Since Friday, at least four of the apps that the Journal had identified and contacted as part of its reporting issued updates to cut off transmission of sensitive data to Facebook, a new round of testing showed Sunday. The apps that made the change include Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker and Azumio Inc.’s Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the tests showed. Another popular food- and exercise-logging app, Lose It!, from FitNow Inc., also stopped sending Facebook information, Sunday’s test showed. In a test on Thursday, the app had been sending Facebook the weight users logged, along with how much they had gained or lost and the caloric content of every food item they logged. (Schechner, 2/24)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday ordered two state agencies to investigate a media report that Facebook Inc may be accessing far more personal information than previously known from smartphone users, including health and other sensitive data. The directive to New York's Department of State and Department of Financial Services (DFS) came after the Wall Street Journal said testing showed that Facebook collected personal information from other apps on users' smartphones within seconds of them entering it. (2/22)

Pinterest, a digital platform popular with parents, took an unusual step to crack down on the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda: It purposefully hobbled its search box. Type “vaccine” into its search bar and nothing pops up. “Vaccination” or “anti-vax”? Also nothing. Pinterest, which allows people to save pictures on virtual pinboards, is often used to find recipes for picky toddlers, baby shower décor or fashion trends, but it has also become a platform for anti-vaccination activists who spread misinformation on social media. (Caron, 2/23)

Arizona was one of seven states that met with federal officials and veterans groups in Washington recently to map out a strategy for reversing the complex problem of suicides among vets. The problem is real in Arizona, which had the sixth-highest veteran suicide rate in the nation in 2016, due in part to the state’s aging veteran population and the wide-open spaces that make access to behavioral services difficult. (Vedantam, 2/24)

The Department of Veterans Affairs released rules for a law that changes how the VA pays for outside, private care. Critics say the move is a stealth effort to privatize the VA. (Lawrence, 2/22)

Five hospital patients who died after getting potentially fatal doses of pain medication may have been given those drugs when there still was a chance to improve their conditions with treatment, an Ohio health system said Friday as its investigation continued. The Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System said it is notifying families of those five people, who were among dozens of patients that received excessive doses ordered by one of its doctors. (2/22)

In addiction phraseology, it’s often called “rock bottom.” It’s a state of mind known as the nadir of suffering, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. Sometimes it’s a jumpoff point at which misery is traded for normalcy and meaning, where one life ends and another begins. Ryan Hess’s rock bottom came during a drizzly December in Ohio. He was yet again high on heroin, and he had been that way for more hours than he could remember. The 33-year-old lay on a filthy sweatshirt beneath a piece — just a small piece — of tent, stolen from a stranger’s garden shed. His socks and shoes were wet, his breath and body reeked. (Fleming, 2/23)

Having lost his 29-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose, Dean Palozej believes dealers who peddle drugs that kill should be locked up for a very long time — for the rest of their life, in some cases. A state representative who heard the story felt the same way. With a piece of legislation introduced this year, he joined lawmakers around the country who have been pushing for murder or manslaughter charges in a get-tough campaign against people who supply drugs that cause fatal overdoses, in efforts to curb the opioid overdose crisis. (Collins, 2/25)

First responders in Concord, Dunbarton, Epping, Hooksett and Laconia have received an initial round of grant funding to help connect people who suffer from substance abuse with emergency services. The Executive Council approved the multimillion-dollar federal grant last week, with the most money so far awarded to Concord to help firefighters and police officers combat the opioid crisis. Concord received nearly $127,000 to implement the program and hire a contract employee to be the in-house opioid program manager for the fire department, said Concord fire Chief Dan Andrus. (2/24)

After reviewing the topic for more than six months, a state commission is likely to note in its final report next week that safe consumption sites are an effective tool for preventing opioid overdose deaths. What comes after that, though, remains the question. (Lisinski, 2/23)

A “cure” that seems too good to be true. A doctor who profits from ineffective or dangerous “treatments.” A product that doesn’t do what it says. All three are health-care frauds — and they can cheat you out of more than money. But how can you arm yourself against these hucksters and scams? The Food and Drug Administrations’s Health Fraud Scams website is a good start. (Blakemore, 2/23)

For the casual visitor, the most striking thing about a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit is the noise. An orchestra of alarms beeps incessantly. The lights are dim, the shades are drawn and the air inside the NICU’s sterile environment is thick with parental anxiety. When babies are born prematurely or sick, they are separated from parents, hooked up to tubes and wires, and cared for in transparent incubators. To understand what is happening to their children, family members must learn a strange new medical vernacular while they await discharge. (Durairaj, 2/23)

Free Hess, a pediatrician and mother, had learned about the chilling videos over the summer when another mom spotted one on YouTube Kids. She said that minutes into the clip from a children’s video game, a man appeared on the screen — offering instructions on how to commit suicide. “I was shocked,” Hess said, noting that since then, the scene has been spliced into several more videos from the popular Nintendo game Splatoon on YouTube and YouTube Kids, a video app for children. Hess, from Ocala, Fla., has been blogging about the altered videos and working to get them taken down amid an outcry from parents and child health experts, who say such visuals can be damaging to children. (Bever, 2/24)

Even if you're not aware of it, it's likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today. This can happen during our most basic exchanges, say on your commute to work. "If someone smiles at you, you smile back at them," says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Yale University. "That's a very fleeting contagion of emotion from one person to another." But it doesn't stop there. Emotions can spread through social networks almost like the flu or a cold. And, the extent to which emotions can cascade is eye-opening. (Aubrey, 2/25)

Katie Zimmerman has two daughters who are 8 months apart. How? She adopted a little girl and then found out she was pregnant. The most challenging part of having two kids so close in age? Getting them to sleep, she said. For months, Zimmerman was constantly exhausted because one child was always awake. To find relief and advice, she didn't call her mom or consult other parents. She called Chesea Kunde, a professional parent coach. (Haller, 2/24)

In 2016, a tiny startup announced an experiment that seemed equal parts medieval sorcery and science fiction: It would inject older people with the blood plasma of young donors in a bid to slow aging. For three years, Ambrosia Chief Executive Officer Jesse Karmazin charged patients $8,000 to infuse one liter of plasma as part of an unorthodox, crowd-funded clinical trial. Karmazin promised extraordinary results—going so far as to proclaim in media interviews that his treatment “comes pretty close” to immortality. (Carville, 2/25)

What if we told you that you could learn a lot about handling adversity from the life of a bug? In their explorations of humans and how we interact with the world around us, the team that makes NPR's Invisibilia stumbled on a surprising fact about the insect world — one that could inspire a new way of looking at ourselves. The epic destruction wrought by swarms of locusts is downright biblical. Exodus tells of a plague that left nothing green in all of Egypt, and we've seen these harbingers of destruction at work in modern day Australia, Argentina and Israel, just to name a few. But for centuries, one essential piece of information about these strange insects eluded scientists: Where do they come from? (Simstrom, 2/22)

Farmers around the globe are struggling to keep up with an increasing global appetite for fats that are perceived as healthy, leading to long-term disruptions in food prices. From Mexico to Norway to New Zealand, avocado growers, fish farmers and butter producers are struggling to increase output so they can meet surging demand, but environmental constraints and other challenges are limiting how much they can churn out. (Craymer, 2/25)

A Colorado state lawmaker is drafting legislation to eliminate an exemption that allows parents to opt out of vaccinating their children for personal reasons. The Denver Channel reported Friday that Democratic Rep. Kyle Mullica has begun drafting the bill, which would make it more difficult for parents to opt out of vaccinations. (Bowden, 2/23)

Multnomah County may have a fifth person infected with measles, county health officials said Sunday. Four people have been diagnosed with measles who were exposed to the highly contagious virus from the Clark County outbreak. This latest case is being treated as a confirmed case, bringing the county’s county up to five so far in 2019, but is not confirmed. However, health officials say that the person shows enough indications of measles to notify the public of places where the possibly infected person visited. (Harbarger, 2/24)

The Clark County measles outbreak grew to 65 confirmed cases and one suspected case Saturday. That represents an increase of one confirmed case from the previous day. The latest individual to come down with the disease hadn’t been immunized, and was between the ages of 1 and 10. Saturday’s new case brings the total to 70 confirmed cases associated with the Clark County outbreak: There also have been four confirmed cases in Multnomah County and one in Seattle in a man who’d visited Vancouver. (Green, 2/24)

Health officials in Japan are combating the country’s worst measles outbreak in years, with many infections clustered among attendees of a Valentine’s Day gift fair and a religious group that avoids vaccinations. A total of 167 cases were reported in 20 of Japan’s 47 prefectures as of Feb. 10, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases said, with the largest outbreaks in the prefectures of Mie and Osaka. It is the fastest Japan has reached that many cases at the beginning of the year since 2008. (Ramzy and Ueno, 2/22)

Kaiser Health News: A Parent-To-Parent Campaign To Get Vaccine Rates Up

In 2017, Kim Nelson had just moved her family back to her hometown in South Carolina. Boxes were still scattered around the apartment, and while her two young daughters played, Nelson scrolled through a newspaper article on her phone. It said religious exemptions for vaccines had jumped nearly 70 percent in recent years in the Greenville area — where they had just moved from Florida. She remembers yelling to her husband in the other room, “David, you have to get in here! I can’t believe this.” (Olgin, 2/25)

A jury in federal court in San Francisco will decide whether Roundup weed killer caused a California man's cancer in a trial starting Monday that plaintiffs' attorneys say could help determine the fate of hundreds of similar lawsuits. Edwin Hardeman, 70, is the second plaintiff to go to trial of thousands around the country who claim agribusiness giant Monsanto's weed killer causes cancer. Monsanto says studies have established that the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, is safe. (2/25)

[Carol] Everett had never contracted with the state and had no clinical background. Many of the pregnancy centers she cited don’t provide contraception, a core service. Yet state health officials gave her much of the money anyway, ignoring warning signs and overruling staff who recommended millions less in funding, according to a review of the contracting by the Houston Chronicle. When Everett’s clinics began failing, the state delayed for months in shifting money to higher performing clinics, instead devoting vast amounts of time to support Everett and her small, understaffed team. Though it’s impossible to say how many more women could have been served had the resources been shifted sooner, several competing clinics burned through their funding early in the grant cycle, surpassing their targets for both spending and patients treated. (Blackman, 2/25)

Public health researchers say Berkeley’s soda tax is working to reduce the consumption of sugary beverages in neighborhoods hit hardest by diabetes, obesity and other chronic health problems linked to too much sugar. Ever since Berkeley voters overwhelmingly passed the nation's first penny-per-ounce tax on sugary beverages in 2014, a team at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health has been interviewing people on the street about what kind of drinks they consume. (Dillon, 2/22)

Overhauling how South Carolina handles mental patients who must be brought to hospitals under the order of a doctor or a court is a more difficult problem than they expected, a group of senators said. Sen. Marlon Kimpson began working on the bill in fall, just weeks after two mental health patients drowned in the back of a locked police van while being moved during Hurricane Florence. (2/23)

Washington state regulators plan to increase the fees doctors and physician assistants must pay to renew their license to practice, citing increased costs tied to discipline as the primary cause of double-digit hikes. The increases are among the first revisions to licensure fees for health care professionals in a phased approach that could affect the tens of thousands of health care workers in Spokane County. The state Department of Health will hold a public meeting on the fee increases in Tumwater next week, amid pushback from the trade group representing the state’s practicing physicians who say the agency hasn’t yet made its case that the hikes, between 54 percent and 96 percent, are urgently needed. (Hill, 2/24)

Arizona is one of at least seven states with curriculum laws around LGBTQ issues, according to the advocacy group GLSEN. But of all the state laws, Arizona's is the only one that bans promoting "a homosexual life-style," says University of Utah law professor Clifford Rosky. (Dale, 2/24)

A Houston federal jury convicted two men of health care fraud and money laundering Friday after finding they had submitted false medical test claims and patient records in a multi-million-dollar fraudulent scheme. Harcharan Narang, a 50-year-old internal medicine doctor who owned a clinic in Cypress, and Dayakar Moparty, a 47-year-old former owner of Red Oak Hospital, face up to 10 years in federal prison for each of 17 health care fraud counts. (Scherer, 2/23)

For the second time in a month, a federal judge has denied a request by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to block the sale of two hospitals to Santa Clara County, saying Becerra doesn’t have the authority to regulate the sale of the nonprofit hospitals to a public entity. It’s unclear whether the attorney general will pursue another appeal and attempt to block the sale before it is set to close at the end of the month. (Vo, 2/22)

As San Francisco faces a resurgence of meth, with spikes in meth-related deaths, emergency room visits and hospitalizations, health officials are grappling with the limited treatment options available for meth addiction. For opioid use disorder there are three FDA-approved medications people can take to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms, and all are pretty effective. For meth and cocaine, there’s nothing. (Dembosky, 2/22)

New York state is proposing the country’s first firm limit on a chemical found in drinking water in heavy concentrations in some Long Island, New York communities. 1,4-dioxane has been labeled a “likely human carcinogen” by the EPA, but is not currently regulated in drinking water at the federal level. (Sreenivasan, Weber and Kargbo, 2/23)

Although its use is still far from widespread, “supportive technology” is emerging as an answer to some of the disability community’s most pressing issues. Advocates see it as a means to help people gain greater independence and reduce reliance on the direct-support workforce, which is struggling under low wages, a shortage of employees and alarmingly high turnover rates. (Price, 2/25)

An Akorn shareholder has filed a class action lawsuit against the Lake Forest-based drugmaker, accusing it of misleading investors about the severity of problems at the company’s Decatur plant. The lawsuit, filed in federal court Thursday, alleges that Akorn; its former CEO Rajat Rai; and its chief financial officer and executive vice president, Duane Portwood, failed to adequately warn investors about the seriousness of manufacturing problems in Decatur that drew the ire of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (Schencker, 2/22)

The Iowa Board of Medicine has promoted its longtime lawyer to executive director. Kent Nebel had served as interim executive director since shortly after his predecessor abruptly retired in July. Nebel, 53, previously served nearly 20 years as the board's legal director. The board licenses physicians and disciplines those who break ethics rules or are found to be practicing unsafe medicine. It often is involved in controversial issues, including abortion and the prescription of addictive painkillers. The board's executive director is one of the state's most powerful regulators of health care. (Leys, 2/22)

Moved by the deaths of immigrants at the nation’s southern border, registered nurses from California, Florida and Texas volunteered to travel to Arizona to provide basic medical support to migrants and asylum seekers Friday through Sunday. (Anderson, 2/22)

A Cuyahoga County inmate died Thursday while being held in a state-run psychiatric hospital. Robert Brown, 52, died Tuesday at University Heights Broadview Medical Center after being taken to the hospital from Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare in Northfield, according to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner. (Ferrise, 2/22)

Five babies in Maricopa County died from congenital syphilis in 2018 as the rate of the disease doubled in the county over the last two years, according to new data from the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. The department counted 30 babies born last year with the "tragic and preventable" disease. (Frank and Sanders, 2/24)

The state of Georgia has reduced homelessness by 51 percent since 2007, and Atlanta has brought it down significantly in that time as well. Since 2015, the number of people who are homeless has dropped almost 30 percent. Advocates in Atlanta are employing some innovative methods to tackle homelessness, like aligning public and private funding streams. (Hobson, 2/22)

A struggle over whether to strip alcohol regulation from the Maryland comptroller’s office turned ugly last week as each side accused the other of putting politics over public health and safety. In the past two years, Comptroller Peter Franchot (D) has pushed legislation that would remove caps on how much craft beer can be made and sold in local breweries. The effort did not succeed, and he angered some fellow Democrats with rhetoric accusing state lawmakers — including House Speaker Michael E. Busch (Anne Arundel) — of being under the thumb of big beer distributors. (Thompson, 2/24)

Twenty-five years ago, Congress hauled before it the top executives of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies and forced them to make a number of long-overdue admissions about cigarettes — including that they might cause cancer and heart disease and that the executives had suppressed evidence of their addictive potential. In one dramatic exchange, when pressed by Representatives Henry Waxman and Ron Wyden, the executives denied that their products were addictive but admitted that they would not want their own children to use them. (2/24)

This week, a 45-year-old immigrant in the U.S. illegally died in Border Patrol custody. His death follows the December deaths of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal and 8-year-old Felipe Alonzo-Gomez in United States immigration custody, both of which prompted demands for improving healthcare for immigrants in detention. As a physician who has evaluated dozens of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for legal groups and human rights organizations, I know that high-profile deaths are only one small piece of the story of severely substandard healthcare in America’s immigration detention system. (Altaf Saadi, 2/25)

Lawyers for the Trump administration object to the suggestion that officials have a moral and humanitarian duty to track children and reunify them with their parents after they have been separated by the government. Sure, said Justice Department attorneys in federal court the other day, hundreds and possibly thousands more migrant children remain split from their parents than previously acknowledged. But it really would be a headache to patch up families torn apart by the administration’s war on immigrants. That’s a paraphrase, but not by much. Requiring the government to determine the number and whereabouts of migrant babies, toddlers and teens wrenched from their parents during a nine-month span when family separations were carried out covertly would “blow the case into some other galaxy of a task.” (2/24)

In his State of the union address, president Trump pledged to end the HIV epidemic in the United States in 10 years. It has been reported that the administration’s new budget proposal will include $250 million in new funding per year in the first year of this initiative for heavily impacted counties and some heavily impacted states, as well as Puerto Rico, with more increases slated for subsequent years over the coming decade. Several national HIV advocacy organizations have announced that they are “cautiously encouraged” by the president’s statement and this new commitment. As political appointees in the Obama White House who worked on HIV/AIDS and drug policy issues, we are also “cautiously encouraged”. Nonetheless, many questions remain. (Regina Labelle and Jeffrey St. Crowley, 2/24)

Mr. C’s brain tumor seemed to be reaching its endgame. His wife had called frantically to report new confusion, word-finding difficulties and visual deficits that suddenly developed despite ongoing treatment. We hastily arranged for an MRI scan to confirm what we now collectively came to suspect: Cancer cells from his tumor had invaded previously unaffected parts of the brain. Much of what is seen as a medical trainee continues to haunt you because it can never be unseen. In my 10 years as a doctor and medical student, I have been witness to inordinate human suffering and unexpected tragedies. And the emotions associated with these experiences went largely unexplored because I had constructed a mental dam over the years to contain them and to prevent their flow into my daily work as a doctor. (Jalal Baig, 2/24)

When my wife and I put a bottle of baby formula to our son’s lips for the first time, it felt like a great defeat. My wife had been struggling day and night to get her breast milk flowing. While we supplemented with formula in the first few days, we hoped it would be a rare occurrence. We turned our house into a milk-making laboratory and invited in consultants who showed us how to encourage our son’s sucking with a strange contraption that involved tubes and a syringe. When my wife wasn’t trying to feed the baby, she was hooked up to a pumping machine. We were all miserable, and at a certain point it became clear that the breast milk would not be enough. (Nathaniel Popper, 2/23)

Misperceptions of black men persist among individuals who have little real-world contact with them. I’m willing to bet that when many Americans close their eyes and imagine a black man, what comes to mind may not be the most positive picture. But it should be. The truth of the matter is that most black men are people with normal jobs and lives like everyone else. Yet that’s difficult for people to appreciate if they don’t see them regularly.Being cared for by a black male doctor can help change this narrative. I see this almost every day at work. When children watch their mom or dad speak with me, they see that their parent respects me. The doctor-patient relationship also builds a special trust. I still vividly remember encounters with my own childhood physician, Dr. Nina Miller, a white woman I revere to this day. (Dale Okorodudu, 2/25)

“Think of a bear.” Shafia Zaloom, a health teacher in San Francisco, stood in front of her 10th grade sex ed class. It was the first day of the spring term and “bear,” at least when it was spelled that way, was not what the students expected to discuss. Once their ursine images were firmly in place, Ms. Zaloom asked for descriptions. One student had pictured a grizzly; another was thinking about a black bear cub; there were polar bears and gummy bears. Personally, I had imagined Yogi. The point, Ms. Zaloom said, is that in a sexual situation, you can’t make assumptions. (Peggy Orenstein, 2/23)

Impact investing is changing the world, offering socially conscious investors opportunities to drive social and environmental change without sacrificing financial returns. It’s become common in sectors like renewable energy and education. But what about health care? It currently ranks seventh among sectors receiving the most capital from impact investors. That’s not high enough to kick-start momentum in the advancement of precision medicines that will save millions of lives. But it won’t take much to change that. (Richard G. Hamermesh and Kathy E. Giusti, 2/25)

The first time I saved my husband’s life, his face was the color of saturated denim. I found him curled on the floor, body fighting itself. Limbs constricted, shoulders twitching, he snorted desperately as his lungs gasped for oxygen. I yelled his name, shook his arm, slapped his face. The sputtering sound came less often, and he was so, so blue. “Has your husband ingested or administered any opioids?” the paramedic asked after they pushed me aside. (Lauren Mauldin, 2/24)

In November, the people of Utah voted to provide health insurance for about 150,000 state residents who lacked it. Last week, Utah’s legislators overruled their own constituents and took away insurance from about 60,000 of those 150,000 people. The legislators claimed they were trying to save money, but that’s not a credible rationale: The federal government would have covered the bulk of the cost. The true reason — which the legislators weren’t willing to admit publicly — was a philosophical objection to government-provided health insurance. (David Leonhardt, 2/22)