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Trump administration officials announced Saturday that immigrants who legally use public benefits like food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers could be denied green cards under new rules aimed at keeping out people the administration deems a drain on the country. The move could force millions of poor immigrants who rely on public assistance for food and shelter to make a difficult choice between accepting financial help and seeking a green card to live and work legally in the United States. (Shear and Baumgaertner, 9/22)

The proposed regulation from the Department of Homeland Security would expand immigration officers' ability to deny visas or legal permanent residency to aspiring immigrants if they have received a range of taxpayer-funded benefits to which they are legally entitled, such as Medicaid, the Medicare Part D low-income subsidy, Section 8 housing vouchers and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is commonly known as food stamps. U.S. immigration law has long required officials to exclude a person likely to become a "public charge" from permanent residence. (Torbati, 9/22)

Hundreds of thousands of low-income children and other members of low-income legal immigrant families could drop out of public programs providing healthcare, nutrition and housing assistance due to a controversial proposed Trump administration rule. (Meyer, 9/23)

The proposal "will clearly define long-standing law to ensure that those seeking to enter and remain in the United States either temporarily or permanently can support themselves financially and will not be reliant on public benefits," the department said. (Spagat, 9/23)

The proposal will publish in the Federal Register in the coming weeks, according to DHS, triggering a 60-day public comment period. “After DHS carefully considers public comments received on the proposed rule, DHS plans to issue a final public charge rule that will include an effective date,” the agency said. DHS officials say they are anticipating court challenges to any change. While the proposal does not include tax credits and other health benefits that were under consideration in previous drafts, immigrant advocates have raised concerns that the rule change will force families to forgo help to avoid jeopardizing their immigration status. (Miroff, 9/22)

“Building on the traumatic separation of families at the border, the Trump administration has taken another cruel step,” Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, said Saturday in a statement. “This proposed rule change will similarly result in the separation of families and is just the latest assault on immigrant families.” The proposal would take into account immigrants’ current and past receipt of benefits above a certain threshold but wouldn’t go into effect until the rule is finalized. The rule will be published in the Federal Register in coming weeks. (Armour and Caldwell, 9/23)

Federal health officials are reshuffling nearly a half-billion dollars this year to cover the expense of sheltering a record number of migrant children in the department’s custody, according to government documents and officials. In a recent letter to several members of Congress, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the department is moving “up to $266 million” to house children from other countries who are on their own, diverting money originally intended for biomedical research, HIV/AIDS services and other health-care purposes. (Goldstein and Moore, 9/21)

Public health advocates are sounding the alarm over President Trump’s decision to divert nearly $200 million from health programs to fund the detention of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed into the country illegally. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Wednesday notified Congress that it intends to transfer up to $186 million from elsewhere in the agency to pay for housing a growing number of migrant children. (Weixel, 9/23)

Arizona health officials threatened on Wednesday to revoke the licenses of 13 federally funded immigrant children shelters, accusing the facilities’ operator, Southwest Key, of displaying an “astonishingly flippant attitude” toward complying with the state’s child protection laws. But a day after the state sent its blistering letter to Southwest Key CEO Juan Sanchez, it became clear that any shutdown would create a tumultuous chain of events for federal and state regulators, who lack options for housing tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who cross the border every year. (Sanders and Grabell, 9/21)

Armando Tabora desperately wants to get his teenage daughter out of the government detention facility where she has been for more than three months. He has been stymied at every turn. The Florida landscaping worker took the bold step of going to a government office to submit fingerprints and other documents required for immigrants to get their children out of government custody — and now that information is being shared with deportation agents. He was then told that the woman he rents a room from would also need to submit fingerprints, something she refused to do. He then sought out friends who are here legally to help him out, to no avail. (Salomon and Torrens, 9/22)

Democrats used to run away from President Obama’s signature health care law. This year, defending Obamacare from Republican attempts to overturn it is central to the party’s efforts to take back Congress. Democratic candidates are running ads and campaigning on shoring up the Affordable Care Act, not just in reliably blue states, but in traditionally Republican strongholds. Though they might not use the word “Obamacare” itself, Democrats warn against GOP legislation and lawsuits that seek repeal or would block the law’s most popular elements.It’s a far cry from 2010, where fury over Obamacare fueled a Tea Party wave that cost Democrats the House and, four years later, the Senate as well. (Sullivan, 9/20)

For months, polls have shown that health care is a top issue for Democratic voters and candidates are leaning into that. A poll conducted in August by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which has closely tracked how health care is playing into the 2018 campaign, found that 27 percent of registered voters said health care was the most important issue for candidates to talk about, trailing only corruption in Washington. In recent campaign cycles, Democrats were on defense on the issue, facing protests and criticism for enacting the 2010 health law as voters blamed them for all of their health care concerns, says Ian Russell, a congressional strategist at Beacon Media who previously worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. (McIntire, 9/24)

Democratic candidates are getting very personal on the campaign trail as they push to preserve Obamacare, frankly sharing tales of their own health struggles. ...Similar messages are coming from three Democratic senators running for reelection in states that President Donald Trump carried in 2016 — Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who had a childhood illness, and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, both of whom have had breast cancer. (Ollstein, 9/22)

The Justice Department told a federal court in June that it would no longer defend provisions in the Affordable Care Act that protect patients with pre-existing medical conditions. In a brief responding to a lawsuit filed by Texas and 19 other states, the Justice Department called the individual mandate — which requires most Americans to buy insurance or face financial penalties — unconstitutional. Government lawyers argued that protections for pre-existing conditions and other medical issues cannot be separated from the individual mandate, and should also be overturned. (Qiu, 9/21)

President Trump attacked the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at a campaign rally on Friday in Missouri for his vote last year against repealing the Affordable Care Act. “We had it defeated, unfortunately we lost a certain vote, but we lost all the Democrat votes when you think,” he said. McCain's was the deciding vote against the GOP’s push to overhaul former President Obama's signature health-care plan. (Axelrod, 9/21)

A federal court ruled this month that a Montana insurer is entitled to federal compensation for subsidy payments under the Affordable Care Act that President Trump abruptly ended last October, a ruling that could reverberate through insurance markets and cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars. At issue are payments for so-called cost-sharing reductions, discounts that enhance the value of health insurance policies purchased from the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces by reducing deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs for low-income consumers. President Trump ended the payments in October, one of a series of executive actions intended to undo President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. (Pear, 9/22)

The woman who has accused Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers has committed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, setting up a potentially explosive confrontation unlike any seen in decades with the future of the Supreme Court at stake. (Stolberg and Fandos, 9/23)

The claim dates to the 1983-84 academic school year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale University. The offices of at least four Democratic senators have received information about the allegation, and at least two have begun investigating it. Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote. (Farrow and Mayer, 9/23)

On Sunday evening, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s top Democrat, asked for an immediate postponement of the hearing after new allegations surfaced in an article in the New Yorker. Deborah Ramirez, a college classmate of Judge Kavanaugh, told the magazine that she remembered that Judge Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a drunken party when they were at Yale University. Judge Kavanaugh said in a statement Sunday that the alleged incident didn’t happen, and the White House said it stood by the nominee. Judge Kavanaugh said, “This is a smear, plain and simple.” (Peterson, Bykowicz and Nicholas, 9/24)

In her letter, Feinstein asked “that the newest allegations of sexual misconduct be referred to the FBI for investigation, and that you join our request for the White House to direct the FBI to investigate the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford as well as these new claims.” (Demirjian, Gardner and Kim, 9/23)

Importantly, Kavanaugh does not yet have the votes to be confirmed and several GOP senators are watching his reaction to the allegations closely. Privately, several Republicans said they were alarmed by the new allegations, but it was not yet clear whether the party will abandon Kavanaugh. The GOP will wait to see the reaction of Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Corker of Tennessee to assess whether they can proceed, according to a person familiar with caucus politics. (Everett, Schor and Korecki, 9/23)

If both Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska vote no, it would likely sink the nomination should all Democrats hold together, but thus far they have not given any indication they would do so. Collins accepted his assertion that Roe is “settled law” despite evidence suggesting Kavanaugh would join with the conservative wing of the court to either partially or wholly strike down the decision. And over the years, both senators have carved out reputations as champions of abortion rights. (Miller, 9/24)

President Trump’s tweet challenging Christine Blasey Ford’s claims because she didn’t report it when it happened set off alarms for survivors and advocates. In fact, most victims never report the sexual assault to law enforcement, says clinical psychologist Veronique Valliere. She joins Amna Nawaz to talks about the complexities of reporting sexual violence. (Nawaz, 9/21)

Endangered Republicans are running ads defending their achievements on health care — but it’s opioids they are boasting about, not the toxic fight about Obamacare and pre-existing conditions. GOP incumbents in Kentucky, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania have run advertising recently focused on their efforts to bolster access to treatment, prevent overdoses and stamp out lethal synthetic painkillers like fentanyl. The conservative American Action Network has chipped in $5 million worth of digital and television ads in battleground districts, touting the GOP's commitment to fighting the epidemic. (Demko and Ehley, 9/22)

Both the Senate and the House have passed bipartisan legislative packages to combat the opioid crisis. With the Senate passing its bill (HR 6), 99-1, on Sept. 17, the two chambers will now need to go to conference to hammer out the differences. But the road to law is likely to be slippery, with key policy issues separating the two bills. Senate aides have said the chamber is nonetheless pursuing an aggressive timeline to begin reconciling the bills as early as this month. (Raman, 9/24)

Consumer and health care groups are scrambling to block what they say is a move by the pharmaceutical industry to commandeer must-pass opioids epidemic legislation as a vehicle for rolling back drugmaker discounts to Medicare beneficiaries with high prescription costs. Republicans said Friday nothing has been decided in behind-the-scenes discussions. But Henry Connelly, a spokesman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, called the effort a "Republican attempt to hijack a bipartisan effort on opioids funding to ram through a multibillion-dollar handout to Big Pharma." (9/21)

Dr. Virginia Sinnott has practiced veterinary medicine for 15 years, but guarding against opioid abuse by pet owners had rarely been part of her job. Until recently. In a sign of the desperation behind the drug epidemic, Sinnott and many other veterinarians believe that more pet owners are using their cats and dogs as a ploy to obtain opioids for themselves. (9/24)

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, in Philadelphia on Saturday to participate in a march to combat stigma against drug addiction, said the Trump administration has made its position on safe injection sites clear: Despite the city's efforts to sanction a site where people can use drugs under medical supervision in order to prevent overdoses, federal officials believe the measure is a violation of federal law. (Whelan, 9/22)

Fatal drug overdoses kept rising in Ohio last year to a record 4,854, a 20 percent increase over 2016′s toll. It was the eighth year in a row that drug deaths increased, according to data on unintentional drug deaths reported to the Ohio Department of Health. (Candisky, 9/23)

Loved ones struggle with figuring out exactly how to help, from initially broaching the topic to navigating endless internet searches about treatment possibilities and inevitable set-backs. Though not exhaustive, what follows is a starting point that can help navigate the process of getting help, based on research and expert input compiled by The Arizona Republic. (Pohl, 9/23)

The Veterans Affairs Administration has cleared itself of wrongdoing and neglect related to the care of veterans at the Manchester VA Medical Center, rejecting whistle-blower complaints of medical neglect, dirty surgical instruments, and flies in an operating room. A 50-page report from the VA’s Office of Medical Inspector found flies are still present but that the operating room isn’t used, and the instruments weren’t dirty, but simply discolored by the New Hampshire city’s water supply. (Estes, 9/22)

Like three previous draft reports from the VA's Office of the Medical Inspector (OMI), the latest report includes few findings of wrongdoing and largely exonerates the hospital's previous administrators, who were reassigned after a group of doctors came forward to The Boston Globe with concerns last July. "I'm just astounded and disgusted. I can't even believe - they made this thing look like some sort of farce that had no basis in reality," said Dr. Ted Daly, who stepped down as chief of radiology out of frustration with the hospital's administration. He still works at the Manchester VA. "It's almost like the people who wrote this investigation didn't even care what any of us had to say and had pre-ordained thoughts about what the outcome was going to be."(Feathers, 9/23)

Tomah VA mental health therapists are treating veterans with PTSD, depression and anxiety in a state-of-the-art combat simulator at nearby Fort McCoy. The multimillion-dollar simulator features full size Humvees and weapons surrounded by a 360-degree video and audio system. (Jones, 9/21)

Service dog providers are seeing an influx of applications from veterans like Michel who have experienced sexual trauma while in the military. But the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides veterinary benefits for service dogs assigned to people with physical disabilities, does not currently recognize psychiatric service dogs as a proven therapy for mental illness. (Lancianese, 9/22)

The Trump administration this week proposed eliminating a decade-old regulation that puts hospitals at risk of losing their Medicare funding if too many of their patients die or suffer organ failure after receiving transplants. The rule the government is proposing to scrap is the same one that led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to cut off funding last month for heart transplants at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston after an investigation by ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle revealed an outsized number of patient deaths and complications in recent years. (Hixenbaugh and Ornstein, 9/21)

It will not be easy drying out, fixing up and rethinking whole ways of life in a region drenched and deeply shaken by more than eight trillion gallons of rain. But that is the challenge facing the Carolinas after Hurricane Florence and a wearying week of heroic rescues, hard choices, potential environmental crises — including a dam breach on Friday that allowed coal ash to seep into a river — and a vast response that is still unfolding. (Blinder and Fausset, 9/22)

North Carolina floodwaters continued to inundate a 47-year-old basin of toxic coal ash alongside Duke Energy’s L.V. Sutton power plant on Saturday, sending polluted waters pouring into a man-made lake and then into the Cape Fear River. The rising waters also swamped a 625-megawatt natural gas plant at the site, forcing it to shut down. The water at the plant was at least six inches deep, Duke spokeswoman Paige H. Sheehan said. Video released by state regulators Saturday showed equipment and buildings at the plant poking up from a vast expanse of water. (Dennis, Mufson and Eilperin, 9/22)

The phrase “coal ash” made headlines this week after a dam on a lake at the site of a power plant in Wilmington, N.C., was breached, allowing the hazardous ash into a river that supplies drinking water to much of the southeastern part of the state. The plant that was shut down, owned by Duke Energy, had been a growing concern since last week after heavy rains associated with Hurricane Florence caused a coal ash landfill at the site to erode, spilling ash onto a roadway. (Mele, 9/21)

Almost two million Americans have severe heart failure, and for them even mundane tasks can be extraordinarily difficult. With blood flow impeded throughout their bodies, patients may become breathless simply walking across a room or up stairs. Some must sleep sitting up to avoid gasping for air. Drugs may help to control the symptoms, but the disease takes a relentless course, and most people with severe heart failure do not have long to live. Until now, there has been little doctors can do. (Kolata, 9/23)

Everyone is born with a hole in the heart. During pregnancy, this hole allows blood to bypass the fetal lungs — which aren’t yet working — and deliver oxygen to the unborn baby’s heart and brain. The small opening, located between the left and right chambers, usually closes on its own within a few months after birth. But in about 1 in 4 babies, it never does. Most of those babies will be fine, and will live their lives not even knowing it. But for some, the defect can prove dangerous. (Cimons, 9/22)

The biopharma company Amarin is making some heart-medicine history Monday with its proprietary, prescription formulation of fish oil, called Vascepa. In a stunning clinical trial result that upends years of skepticism about the long-term heart benefit of products containing omega-3 fatty acids, Amarin’s Vascepa significantly reduced the risk of deaths, heart attacks, strokes and other serious cardiovascular events compared to a placebo. (Feuerstein, 9/24)

Drug development for Alzheimer’s disease has been a series of disappointments, with only faint glimmers of hope from pharmaceutical companies or academic labs. What causes the disease is still hotly debated, with the amyloid hypothesis losing believers after each new trial failure. But before those drugs targeting amyloid plaques or tau tangles failed in human trials, they generally succeeded in preclinical studies — specifically, ones done with mice. Right now, about 160 mouse models for Alzheimer’s exist. But none is particularly good, experts say. (Sheridan, 9/24)

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday revealed that the country’s burden of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias will double by the year 2060. ...In 2014, 5 million Americans — or 1.6 percent of the population — felt the burden of the diseases. The figure is expected to grow to 13.9 million, equating to nearly 3.3 percent of the projected population in 2060. (Pirani, 9/21)

By now, Sally and Bennett Shaywitz might have retired to a life of grandchild-doting and Mediterranean-cruising. Instead, the Shaywitzes — experts in dyslexia at Yale who have been married to each other for 55 years — remain as focused as ever on a research endeavor they began 35 years ago. Sally, 76, and Bennett, 79, both academic physicians, run the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. (Hafner, 9/21)

Drinking too much alcohol killed more than 3 million people in 2016, mostly men, the World Health Organization said. The U.N. health agency also warned that current policy responses are not sufficient to reverse trends predicting an increase in consumption over the next 10 years. (9/22)

Dozens of free-standing clinics have opened across the U.S. in recent years to provide [ketamine] to patients who are desperate for an effective therapy and hopeful ketamine can help. But the investigation found wide-ranging inconsistencies among clinics, from the screening of patients to the dose and frequency of infusions to the coordination with patients’ mental health providers. A number of clinics stray from recommendations issued last year by the American Psychiatric Association. (Thielking, 9/24)

The tall teenager with the buzz cut opened the museum door, extended a large hand and said cheerily, “Welcome to the Spam Museum.” Samuel Ehret is an official “Spambassador”at the museum, a hot spot for tourists who have a taste for the much-mocked canned meat that has been made here by Hormel Foods for 81 years. Samuel is also autistic, and he got this job because he loves all things Spam — its taste, its history, and especially the museum’s showpiece: a motorcycle that runs on bacon grease. (Nutt, 9/23)

Today, 20 Americans will die waiting for a donated organ. Meanwhile, the United States’ transplant waiting list — more than 114,000 — will add a name every 10 minutes. Nova’s “Transplanting Hope” tells the story of the people who wait, those who give and those assigned the terrifying privilege of saving lives with transplanted organs. (Blakemore, 9/22)

The opioid crisis has sparked fresh awareness of babies born dependent on the drugs their mothers used. But it wasn't heroin or pain pills that caused Robert so much harm. His mother chose something far more common, and, scientists say, even more devastating. (Girodano, 9/24)

Within three days of starting high school this year, my ninth-grader could not get into bed before 11 p.m. or wake up by 6 a.m. He complained he couldn't fall asleep but felt foggy during the school day and had to reread lessons a few times at night to finish his homework. And forget morning activities on the weekends — he was in bed. We're not the only family struggling to get restful shut-eye. (Fulton, 9/23)

A Cornell University professor whose attention-getting studies reported that guests at Super Bowl parties consumed more calories when served snacks from larger bowls and that couch potatoes ate nearly twice as much when watching an action-packed movie than when viewing a PBS talk show will step down from the university at the end of the academic year. Brian Wansink, the longtime director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, submitted his resignation this week after a year-long review concluded that he committed academic misconduct, according to a statement from the university’s provost. (Kaplan, 9/21)

Kaiser Health News: Blood, Sweat And Workplace Wellness: Where To Draw The Line On Incentives 

Workplace wellness programs that offer employees a financial carrot for undergoing health screenings, sticking to exercise regimens or improving their cholesterol levels have long been controversial. Next year, they may become even more contentious. Two recent court rulings have cast uncertainty over what is the appropriate limit for financial incentives that employers can offer workers to participate in programs that require clinical testing or disclosure of personal health data. The dollar amount is subject to debate because it raises questions about when the incentives become so high that employees feel they don’t have a choice about participating. (Appleby, 9/24)

About a hundred years ago, something devious started happening in our homes and offices, in our cars and at restaurants — and our backs have never been the same. For hundreds — even thousands of years — chairs were made of wood. Maybe the seat was covered with cord or cattail leaves, and if you were rich, you could afford some padded upholstery, which began to take off in the 17th and 18th centuries. (Doucleff, 9/24)

In the last three years, a dozen states have banned localities from passing paid leave requirements, more than doubling to 22 the states that now outlaw such local ordinances. The push for so-called preemption laws is backed by the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a membership organization of state legislators who favor limited government. The state moves come in response to the increasing number of cities and counties passing paid sick days ordinances. Since 2015, more than 20 cities, as well as eight states, have approved measures mandating that companies provide local workers with paid sick leave. Since San Francisco approved the first paid sick leave ordinance in 2006, paid sick day requirements have been passed in 35 cities or counties and 11 states. (Alvarez, 9/24)

D.C. Fire and EMS officials found positive signs in the first 90 days of a $1 million nursing phone line at the 911 call center, but have yet to see big dividends in one of the program’s intended goals: reducing ambulance trips for patients who don’t need them. D.C. Fire Chief Gregory Dean sent a letter to the department this month highlighting early data from the “Right Care, Right Now” program that staffs a triage line at the 911 center with registered nurses. The nurses are there to diagnose callers who appear to have nonlife-threatening maladies or injuries and may not need medics or a fire crew and a trip to the emergency room. (Williams, 9/23)

Emissions near a troubled St. Louis County landfill once posed health concerns for workers and nearby residents, but the risks have largely disappeared thanks to cleanup efforts, according to a state report released Friday. The report from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is based on air quality data collected near Bridgeton Landfill , which has come under intense scrutiny because a smoldering underground fire burns only a few hundred yards from Cold War-era nuclear waste. (9/21)

A California appeals court has ruled in favor of state regulators in their attempt to impose fines on a subsidiary of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group related to more than 900,000 alleged violations of a California law on insurance claims. Dave Jones, the insurance commissioner in California, issued a statement Friday saying the court ruling this week paves the way for another court to affirm some $91 million in fines against PacifiCare, an insurance company that UnitedHealth Group acquired more than a decade ago. The deal substantially expanded the company's UnitedHealthcare health insurance business, which is now the nation's largest carrier. (Snowbeck, 9/21)

A Virginia school district’s effort to arm teachers and other school employees has encountered a setback after a state agency refused to endorse the district’s plan. The Department of Criminal Justice Services rejected Lee County Superintendent Brian Austin’s application to register as an armed special conservator of the peace, a designation the district hoped would permit school employees to carry firearms in schools. (Truong, 9/23)

The Ohio Department of Health says it isn’t purposely delaying release of documents related to a mailing last year that could have publicly identified 6,000 HIV-positive Ohioans. But others have their doubts.It has been more than 10 weeks since The Dispatch requested records relating to the department’s decisions that led to the mailing by CVS, which undertook the work even though the department’s request for proposals said the state would handle it. (Schladen, 9/21)

Families fighting to preserve the rights of Ohioans with developmental disabilities to live in residential care centers equipped to meet their needs have filed a lawsuit against the state and other groups in federal court in Columbus. The dozen families named in the case say the push toward policies that promote home- and community-based services could force their loved ones into apartments, group homes and other settings not suitable for people with complex disabilities and medical conditions. (Price, 9/21)

A California kindergartner can keep bringing a cannabis-based drug used for emergency treatment of a rare form of epilepsy to her public school, a judge ruled Friday. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reported that a judge sided with the family of 5-year-old Brooke Adams. The Rincon Valley Union School District in Santa Rosa sought to ban the ointment from school grounds because it contains the active ingredient in marijuana. (9/22)

California administrative law judge ruled on Friday that a 5-year-old Santa Rosa girl with a severe form of pediatric epilepsy is entitled to attend public kindergarten with her cannabis oil. And her one-on-one nurse, provided by the school district, will be able to administer it to her whenever she needs it. (Romney, 9/21)

After exploring the idea and stirring worries and warnings from retired teachers and elected officials, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas opted Friday not to raise monthly health care premiums for a group of nearly 68,000 retired teachers. Last month, the TRS Board of Trustees considered raising premiums for TRS-Care —Texas’ health insurance program for retired teachers —by $50 per month, starting in 2019. (Zdun, 9/21)

After months of headlines about missing runaways, foster children sleeping in offices and high-profile deaths, this was the last thing the Kansas Department for Children and Families wanted to see. A 13-year-old in the state’s custody reportedly was raped inside a child welfare office in Olathe. And the young man charged with the assault earlier this month also was in Kansas’ care. (Bauer, 9/23)

While Franklin County’s infant-mortality rate dipped in 2017, disparities worsened for African-American babies, who were nearly three times more likely to die than white babies. Babies also were at higher risk in eight Columbus neighborhoods — in the Hilltop, Franklinton, the Near South Side, the Near East Side, the Southeast Side, the Northeast Side and one in the Northland area — prioritized by the countywide CelebrateOne infant-mortality initiative. (Viviano, 9/21)

Beats of Love was started by a handful of nurses in Tampa General’s neonatal intensive care unit who had heard of a similar program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. ...The instrument allows nurses to record a heartbeat while they listen to it during a routine exam. (Griffin, 9/21)

E-cigarette use among young people in Florida spiked over the past year, according to data released by Tobacco Free Florida. The rate of e-cigarette use among youth between the ages of 11 and 17 increased by 60 percent between 2017 and2018. Nearly one in four high school students now report using e-cigarettes. (Ochoa, 9/21)

Lead paint and other hazards would be removed from more Milwaukee homes. Thousands of water filters would be given to city residents, and 1,000 lead pipes would be removed. And a special team would be created to focus on homes with lead-poisoned children living in them. Those are among the proposals included in Mayor Tom Barrett’s 2019 budget plan, which includes $20 million devoted to addressing Milwaukee’s ongoing lead crisis. (Spicuzza, 9/22)

A top Milwaukee Health Department staffer scaled back efforts to clean up homes with lead-poisoned children living in them, newly released records say. During the last two years — 2016 and 2017 — the city didn't clean up a single house with lead-poisoned children living in it, the records also show. (Spicuzza and Bice, 9/21)

A law firm says a Georgia jury has awarded $31 million to a boy for a botched circumcision he received as a newborn. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the award was handed down Friday in northern Georgia’s Clayton County. A lawsuit filed by the boy’s family says he was 18 days old in October 2013 when part of his penis was severed during a circumcision at Life Cycle Pediatrics in Riverdale. (9/23)

Approximately 60,000 people died from non-methadone opioid overdoses in the United States last year, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you squint at the CDC statistics very hard, you can barely make out a positive trend: the growth in deaths attributable to heroin and common forms of prescription opioids seems to have slowed between 2015 and 2017. However, that smidgen of progress was more than offset by a wave of death from synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, which killed 29,406 people in 2017 — up from roughly 3,000 in 2013. (9/22)

The “overdose epidemic” that so many Americans are talking about isn’t really a single epidemic. It’s actually several of them, something we began exploring when we graphed the yearly counts of overdose deaths for the last 40 years.It turns out that, when totaled, these sub-epidemics trace a nearly perfect exponential growth curve. For four decades, overdose deaths have been growing, doubling about every eight years. (Hawre Jalal and Donald S. Burke, 9/20)

With the opioid epidemic continuing to plague America, it's never been more important to help those suffering from addiction find quality and trusted treatment options. Addiction is a complex medical issue that requires clinical treatment to address both the disease of addiction and co-occurring mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. (Michael Cartwright, 9/21)

It has been almost exactly 27 years since the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and we are still defensively explaining — including to our troglodyte president — why women do not always tell the authorities about verbal and physical sexual assaults, why they bury episodes or try to maneuver past them. We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West, who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist. (Maureen Dowd, 9/22)

But Trump and the GOP have now taken an issue that could have been handled carefully and respectfully and cast it into the fever swamps of patriarchal idiocy.High-profile conservative activist Ed Whelan, a friend of Kavanaugh, cooked up an outlandish conspiracy theory suggesting Ford is mistaking Kavanaugh for another classmate. The details are too ludicrous to describe, but it wound up pinning the alleged assault — which Republicans have been strongly suggesting never happened — on a man who is now a middle school teacher in Georgia. South Carolina Republican Rep. Ralph Norman acted like sexual assault is comedic fodder: “Did y’all hear the latest late-breaking news on the Kavanaugh hearings? Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out that she was groped by Abraham Lincoln.” And President Trump, a man we’ve all heard bragging about how he liked to take women and “Grab ’em by the pussy,” thought not about the country as a whole, not about the untold numbers of sexual assault victims deserving of sensitivity and respect, but only about himself, his Supreme Court nominee and men in general. (Rex Huppke, 9/21)

The past year has brought some validation to female Senate aides. “We never thought there would be any kind of accountability, so to see it happening feels like you can finally exhale,” Ms. Keefe said, speaking about the general #MeToo movement. But the scrambling over Judge Kavanaugh has reawakened old traumas while creating some new ones. It’s not just the daily stress of filtering, as one aide described them to me, the “horrible” calls to Senate offices, including threats of rape against the young women answering the phones. For Democratic women, there’s also a simmering outrage over Republican treatment of Dr. Blasey. Many of the women I spoke with identify closely with Dr. Blasey and her slow and unwilling creep into public view. (Britt Peterson, 9/22)

Despite the #MeToo movement, pedophile priests, sexually predatory coaches, TV star rapists, congressmen with secret sex settlements — and a president multiply accused of sexual assault who brags about his ability to get away with it and apparently pays hush money to a porn star and a Playboy playmate — we don’t just doubt sex crime victims, we eviscerate them. So now a respected and upstanding woman says Kavanaugh nearly raped her when she was but 15. Trump and his Republican enablers clearly don’t care if he did, or did not. (Margert Eagan, 9/24)

Poor Republicans. They’ve tried so hard to be subtle, to seem respectful of Christine Blasey Ford, even as they’ve maneuvered to undermine her. They would hear her accusations that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school, they wanted us to know, if only she’d testify on their terms. They wanted Americans to think they had evolved in the 27 years since Anita Hill accused another Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, of sexual misconduct. Leave it to Donald Trump to strip away the mask and reveal the troglodyte beneath. Administration officials reportedly labored to keep him from going on the attack against Dr. Blasey, but after a few days, the presidential id once again rose up and overwhelmed them and their message. (9/21)

I remember those parties. I remember the fear that my parents would find out I was there. Do not underestimate fear of parents as a reason for a teenager not to reveal an assault. But Blasey’s explanation of why she didn’t report her allegation back then hasn’t satisfied many people, most notably the president of the United States, whose tweet on Friday morning triggered the Twitter backlash."I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says,” he tweeted, “charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.” I have a lot of doubt that Dr. Blasey, as she prefers to be called, would have done any such thing. (Mary Schmich, 9/21)

With Democrats becoming increasingly ambitious in their policy goals, Republicans believe they have a killer answer to any new proposal: How are you going to pay for it? The fact that this question is asked in complete bad faith — the GOP is the party that recently passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy without bothering to pay for it — doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. And one reason is that it will probably also be asked by the Washington media, people who as a group are enthusiastic deficit scolds, at least when it comes to programs that actually benefit ordinary people. (Paul Waldman, 9/20)

Teens lighting up are hard to find these days, but there’s no mistaking the thick clouds of vapor they exhale in classrooms, school bathrooms and at parties. E-cigarettes have replaced the cancer sticks that hooked previous generations. Teen use has risen to an “epidemic of addiction,” says Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.The FDA has announced a major crackdown on retailers selling vaping products to minors. If the industry doesn’t clean up its act, Gottlieb says, the FDA will ban the flavored liquids used in e-cigarettes that attract underage users and appear designed to get them hooked. This is a much-needed, tougher approach on a multibillion-dollar industry profiting at the expense of children’s health. (9/24)

There is growing interest in the problem of surprise medical bills in the media and on Capitol Hill, with a bipartisan group of senators drafting legislation to crack down on the problem. But the issue has not been prominent in midterm campaigns and is not showing up in campaign ads. Why it matters: Recent analyses, including polling and a report on employers' medical claims, show that surprise bills could have as much — or even more — traction with the public than other health issues being featured in the midterms. In an election where health care is top-of-mind, candidates may be missing an opportunity. (Drew Altman, 9/24)

One reason Planned Parenthood selected Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen as its new president is because of her background as an emergency room doctor. What better way to emphasize the critical role Planned Parenthood plays in providing health care services each year to nearly 2.5 million people than having a doctor at the helm? Another reason is likely hinted at by something Dr. Wen said in 2016, a year into her job as health commissioner. “I’ve learned that I like a fight,” she told NPR, “. . . and I’m good at it.” (9/21)

Make no mistake: Increased screening for colorectal cancer is important. It’s the third most common type of cancer (excluding skin cancer) in the United States, and is expected to kill more than 50,000 Americans this year. But many gastroenterologists like me are concerned about the referral cases we’re seeing for follow-up colonoscopies triggered by positive Cologuard tests, especially those in which Cologuard should not have been prescribed in the first place. Many of us are also concerned that an outsized focus on convenience is overshadowing serious limitations of the test. (Naresh Gunaratnam, 9/24)

When we think of biases in research, the one that most often makes the news is a researcher’s financial conflict of interest. But another bias, one possibly even more pernicious, is how research is published and used in supporting future work. A recent study in Psychological Medicine examined how four of these types of biases came into play in research on antidepressants. The authors created a data set containing 105 studies of antidepressants that were registered with the Food and Drug Administration. Drug companies are required to register trials before they are done, so the researchers knew they had more complete information than what might appear in the medical literature. (Aaron E. Carroll, 9/24)

There’s good news and there’s bad news. This summer, the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly to repeal that country’s long-standing ban on abortion – a ban that shamed and forced Irish women to leave their country if they needed the safe and common medical procedure.The joy on Irish women’s faces as the results came in (repeal won with 66.4 percent of the vote) was infectious and inspiring. ...At home in Kentucky, however, we seem to be moving backwards. Our commonwealth has only one abortion clinic to serve millions of residents. Our General Assembly continues to pass, and our governor continues to sign, hostile legislation designed to chip away steadily at reproductive rights. It seems that those in power won’t rest until abortion access in Kentucky is merely theoretical. (Kim Greene, 9/21)

The boy who loves origami picked up a napkin, and with a few flicks of his fingers, turned it into a star. I could tell he was smart and at ease talking with adults even before I learned he had won a math competition and was asked by his school to serve as an ambassador for new families. On the day I met him, he was all smiles and excited energy. He was not a boy who looked like he wanted to kill himself. (Theresa Vargas, 9/22)

As suicide rates increase, each of us needs to take actions large and small to lower these numbers. Policymakers need to increase access to mental health services. ...Even though suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, the lack of funding for suicide research shows a lack of concern by elected officials. (André-Tascha Lammé, 9/21)

We must tell the federal government that Texans living with kidney failure deserve so much better. For the sake of patient choice, affordability and the right to good health, I urge every member of the kidney care community to contact your members of Congress to express your concern with proposed cuts through emails and phone calls. (Tiffany Jones-Smith, 9/23)

The measure would allow the Legislature to issue $2 billion of bonds to fund housing for homeless people with mental health problems. The money to pay off the bonds — estimated at $120 million a year — would come directly from Proposition 63 revenues, the tax on wealthy Californians that voters passed in 2004 to finance better mental health care.It’s both a humane and smart use of funds. (9/22)

The Board of Supervisors manages a $3.5 billion general fund budget and is charged with keeping the most basic services afloat, ranging from public health to transportation to public safety. ...Santa Clara County voters should take pride from living in an area that reaches out to help those who struggle to care for themselves. They make the county a better place for all. Vote yes on Measure A on Nov. 6. (9/21)