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The Food and Drug Administration on Monday warned 12 sellers of dietary supplements to stop claiming their products can cure Alzheimer’s disease. At the same time, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner, suggested that Congress strengthen the F.D.A.’s authority over an estimated $40 billion industry, which sells as many as 80,000 kinds of powders and pills with little federal scrutiny. (Kaplan, 2/11)

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency is planning policy changes that could lead to the most important regulatory modernization since enactment of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which set up the regulatory regime. Under the law, dietary supplements are regulated as food and, therefore, are not subject to premarket approval or the kind of safety and effectiveness testing required for drugs. Since the law was enacted, the industry has grown from 4,000 products and $4 billion a year in sales to as many as 80,000 products and $50 billion in sales, according to the FDA. (McGinley, 2/11)

“Legitimate industry benefits from a framework that inspires the confidence of consumers and providers,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “Patients benefit from products that meet high standards for quality.” Dietary supplements are a booming industry, with some 80,000 kinds of supplements sold in 2016, according to a recent government report. U.S. supplement sales reached nearly $133 billion in 2016, according to the most recent data from Zion Market Research. (Hopkins, 2/11)

Three out of four Americans take dietary supplements on a regular basis, Gottlieb said. “That’s why today we are announcing a new plan for policy advancements with the goal of implementing one of the most significant modernizations of dietary supplement regulation and oversight in more than 25 years,” he said.(Sullivan, 2/11)

The agency warned 17 companies for illegally making claims about their products' ability to treat diseases. Here's a look at what the FDA's announcement means. (Choi, 2/11)

For the past two years, [Cory] Booker has been repeatedly reminded of that kind of anger over high drug prices — and hounded by criticism that he has an overly cozy relationship with the pharma industry. Last week, the hosts of “Pod Save America,” a progressive political podcast, said he had taken “a bad vote on pharmaceuticals.” A viral Facebook video viewed nearly a quarter-million times questions whether Booker is a “Big Pharma” candidate. And on the left-leaning “Breakfast Club” radio show last week, Booker was pointedly asked whether he could be trusted to hold large pharmaceutical companies accountable. That reputation, deserved or not, could become a major political liability for Booker, particularly at a time of concern over drug prices and in a race with other progressive lawmakers like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders whose disdain for large drug companies is palpable. (Facher, 2/12)

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is running for president on a policy agenda of lowering prescription drug costs, expanded savings accounts to help people save for their educations, and a slew of Internet-related policies, including expanding rural broadband and tougher privacy laws, according to aides to the senator. Klobuchar, who has withheld her support from the more liberal proposals made by Democratic lawmakers, will also push for automatically registering all eligible voters, an overhaul of election security, and committing the United States to the Paris agreement to combat climate change, aides said. (Stein, 2/11)

House Democrats are planning to unveil Medicare for All legislation soon, turning up the heat on Democratic presidential candidates facing questions over how far they want to go in embracing a national government health system. The bill from Rep. Pramila Jayapal and other House Democrats is expected to closely mirror a Senate Medicare for All bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), which would expand government-run health insurance to all and do away with the current system of employer-provided coverage. At the same time, more than 100 organizing events will take place this week nationwide to help build grass-roots support for Medicare for All. (Armour, 2/11)

The Trump administration is proposing steps aimed at improving patients’ access to their own health data, bolstering efforts to bring information including insurance claims, hospital and doctor records to digital devices such as smartphones. Federal health regulators unveiled two major proposed regulations closely watched by health and technology companies, amid a growing flood of health data that has become an ever-more-valuable asset. (Wilde Mathews, 2/11)

CMS on Monday released proposed rules that require many types of insurers to provide electronic health data in a standard format by 2020. In two long-anticipated rules, the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology proposed requiring healthcare providers and insurers to implement open data-sharing technology to ensure data can move from one plan to another, potentially by way of patient apps. (King, 2/11)

This year, one in every twenty Americans will walk into a medical clinic and receive the wrong diagnosis. That’s more than 10 million people, and for half of them, the misdiagnosis could be harmful, a 2014 study in the British Medical Journal concluded. Doctors try to be systematic when identifying illness and disease, but they’re only human. Bias creeps in. Alternatives are overlooked. (Metz, 2/11)

A U.S. citizen who leaked the names of more than 14,000 HIV-positive individuals in Singapore may be in possession of more "files" from the database, the city-state's health minister said on Tuesday. The news follows outrage last month after Singapore disclosed the leak by Mikhy Farrera Brochez, who was deported last year after being convicted on numerous drug-related and fraud offences, including lying about his own HIV status. (2/12)

Federal investigators have closed an investigation into a potential breach of a HIV patient list in Nashville after concluding it was unlikely that anyone inappropriately accessed the private information of patients. But the investigation did not conclude exhaustively that the information didn’t leak, leaving a shred of doubt for an HIV-positive community that remains terrified of being outed by others. The identities and private information of thousands of Tennessee HIV patients became exposed two years ago after the Metro Nashville Public Health Department inadvertently placed a confidential list of patients, intended to be used by only a few scientists, on a computer server accessible to about 500 employees. (Kelman, 2/11)

Across the U.S., more employers are handing out activity trackers and rolling out high-tech wellness programs that aim to keep closer tabs on workers’ exercise, sleep and nutrition, and ultimately cut ballooning health-care costs. Disney, Whole Foods and dozens of other companies have introduced programs to reward employees for meeting certain criteria on health indicators such as weight-to-height ratio and blood pressure. (Chen, 2/11)

Eight immigrant families who were separated under Trump administration policy filed claims Monday seeking millions of dollars in damages for what a lawyer called "inexplicable cruelty" that did lasting damage to parents and children. The parents accused immigration officers of taking their children away without giving them information and sometimes mocking them or denying them a chance to say goodbye. (Merchant, 2/11)

The Trump administration was hit with a legal claim on Monday from six migrant families seeking millions of dollars in compensation for the trauma they say they continue to endure after border officers forcibly took away their children and sent them to live in shelters in other states under a zero-tolerance policy. The six families are individually seeking $6 million — $3 million for each mother and $3 million for each child — for a total of $36 million, according to the legal claims filed on their behalf by a group of immigration advocacy organizations and law firms. (Gonzalez, 2/11)

More than 70 people being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center while they wait for immigration court hearings have signed a letter decrying conditions at the facility. The letter, written in December, alleges that detainees have experienced medical neglect, safety issues, and racism and discrimination, according to Freedom for Immigrants, the group to whom the letter was addressed. The detainees also said their complaints were not being heard at the facility. (Morrissey, 2/11)

Across California, a blessing has become a curse for patients who dwell in overwhelmingly white communities: their ready access to opioid pain relievers. A new study of prescribing practices across all of California’s 1,760 ZIP codes helps explain why opiates, some of medicine’s most addictive drugs, have wreaked more havoc on white communities than on communities of color. The answer, at least in part, appears to lie in unconscious physician biases about race, ethnicity and pain that more typically leave minority patients underserved and undermedicated, authors of the new study said. (Healy, 2/11)

On a bitter cold afternoon in front of the central bus stop in Bangor, Maine, about a half-dozen people recently surrounded a folding table covered with handmade signs offering free clean syringes, coffee and naloxone, the drug also known as Narcan that can reverse an opioid overdose. They're with a group called the Church of Safe Injection that is handing out clean drug-using supplies in cities around the U.S. (Becker, 2/12)

A 15th wrongful-death lawsuit has been filed against an Ohio hospital system and a now-fired intensive care doctor who's under investigation for ordering possibly fatal pain medication doses for dozens of patients. Many of the lawsuits allege patients in the Columbus-based Mount Carmel Health System received lethal doses of the powerful painkiller fentanyl ordered by Dr. William Husel without families knowing. (2/11)

Opioid-based medications that help curb cravings, prevent overdoses, and allow drug users to get through the day without the fear of painful withdrawal have been proven to help people achieve lasting recovery far more reliably than quitting without medical help. But, doctors say, federal regulations surrounding these treatment medications — and the special physician training and monitoring required to dispense them — have deterred many of their colleagues from obtaining the license needed to prescribe the drug. (Whelan, 2/11)

Patients seeking other pain treatment options often find that their insurers won’t foot the bill or are forcing them to jump through maddening hoops to get coverage. Experts in and out of government worry that this will make it more difficult to reverse the deadly opioid crisis that killed more than 47,000 people nationwide in 2017, even as doctors cut back on opioid prescribing and state and federal governments step up efforts to prevent and treat addiction. (Demko, 2/11)

Massachusetts is advising life and disability insurers not to deny coverage to good Samaritans who carry the overdose-reversal drug naloxone. The guidelines, issued earlier this month, follow a WBUR story in December about a Boston nurse who was denied life insurance because she carries the drug. (Bebinger, 2/12)

Over the past few years, Facebook has stepped up its efforts to prevent suicide, but its attempt to help people in need has opened the tech giant to a series of issues concerning medical ethics, informed consent, and privacy. It has also raised a critical question: Is the system working?Facebook trained an algorithm to recognize posts that might signal suicide risk and gave users a way to flag posts. A Facebook team reviews those posts and contacts local authorities if a user seems at imminent risk. First responders have been sent out on “wellness checks” more than 3,500 times. (Thielking, 2/11)

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is embroiled in controversy for admitting that he wore blackface at a party in the 1980s and for a racist photo on his medical school yearbook page. But the governor, a pediatric neurologist by training, told CBS he isn't resigning, because "Virginia needs someone that can heal. There's no better person to do that than a doctor." NPR spoke with another doctor, Damon Tweedy, about what message it sends to black patients to hear a prominent doctor tell the country that he has worn blackface. Tweedy is the author of Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine and is an associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University. (Kelly and Gordon, 2/11)

The CDC recommends adults over 65 get vaccinated for pneumonia. Officials estimate that close to 70 percent of people within that age group have gotten the vaccine. Since pneumonia is still the leading infectious cause of death in children younger than 5 years old worldwide, they should not be exposed to people who have an infection of the lungs. (Haas, 2/11)

Half of children with a mental health condition in the United States go without treatment, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The researchers analyzed data from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health, a nationwide survey administered to parents of children and teens. Of the 46.6 million children ages 6 through 18 whose parents completed the survey, 7.7 million had at least one mental health condition -- such as depression, anxiety or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder -- and only half received treatment or counseling from a mental health provider in the 12 months prior to the survey. (Brancho-Sanchez, 2/11)

A large review of studies confirms that exercise can be a good way to help reduce the frequency of falls in the elderly. The analysis, in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, included 108 randomized controlled trials with more than 23,000 participants. Their average age was 76, and 77 percent were women. As controls, the trials used either educational information about fall prevention, or no intervention at all. (Bakalar, 2/12)

Eating out is hard for Tripp. He has a severe peanut allergy. But the family tries to live as normally as possible, communicating Tripp’s allergy with servers and always carrying an EpiPen. In part, the family is buoyed by Massachusetts’ already strong food allergy law. (Baskin, 2/11)

The quick and easy noshes you love are chipping away at your mortality one nibble at a time, according to new research from France: We face a 14% higher risk of early death with each 10% increase in the amount of ultraprocessed foods we eat. "Ultraprocessed foods are manufactured industrially from multiple ingredients that usually include additives used for technological and/or cosmetic purposes," wrote the authors of the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. "Ultraprocessed foods are mostly consumed in the form of snacks, desserts, or ready-to-eat or -heat meals," and their consumption "has largely increased during the past several decades." (Scutti, 2/11)

In a list of gene-editing companies jotted down by your average CRISPR enthusiast, MilliporeSigma likely wouldn’t appear. Sangamo, sure. The numerous commercial spinoff companies from the Broad Institute and the University of California, certainly. But MilliporeSigma has at least one patent that it believes every company applying the technology will need to license — and some companies are already doing that. (Sheridan, 2/12)

New mothers who have friends ready to step in and help them, tend to have toddlers who score better on cognitive tests than the babies of women with smaller social support networks, a U.S. study suggests. Strong social ties to friends and family have long been linked to better behavioral and physical health outcomes for adults. And plenty of previous research also indicates that infants’ and toddlers’ bonds with caregivers can have a lasting impact on children’s emotional, intellectual and social development. (Rapaport, 2/12)

Mahendra Agrawal never imagined he would have a heart attack. He followed a vegetarian diet, exercised regularly and maintained a healthy weight. His blood pressure and cholesterol levels were normal. But when Mr. Agrawal experienced shortness of breath in June 2013, his wife urged him to go to a hospital. There, tests revealed that Mr. Agrawal, who was 63 at the time, had two obstructed coronary arteries choking off blood flow to his heart, requiring multiple stents to open them. (O'Connor, 2/12)

From sports drinks to protein powders, from compression therapy to cupping — there's a whole industry of products and services designed to help us adapt to and recover from exercise. But does any of it work? That's the question science writer Christie Aschwanden set out to answer in her new book, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. A former high school and college athlete, Aschwanden is the lead science writer for the website fivethirtyeight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. (Gross, 2/11)

Public health experts are continuing to sound the alarm on the teen vaping epidemic, tying the 1.3 million increase in teen tobacco users from 2017 to 2018 directly to e-cigarettes. The rise has been so significant that it has wiped out any progress in declining youth tobacco use in recent years, according to a report published Monday. (Kounang, 2/11)

There may be several reasons, but a recent boom in vaping is the most likely explanation, said Brian King of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We were making progress, and now you have the introduction of a product that is heavily popular among youth that has completely erased that progress," King said. (Stobbe, 2/11)

Republican lawmakers in Ohio proposed again on Monday one of the most restrictive abortion measures in the nation, and this time around, they have the governor's support. New Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has indicated he would sign the so-called heartbeat bill that was twice vetoed by his GOP predecessor. The measure would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. That can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they're pregnant. (Franko, 2/11)

A bill that would prohibit “deceptive practices” at faith-based pregnancy centers drew passionate — and conflicting — testimony from people on both sides of the issue at a legislative public hearing Monday. Those supporting the bill said it is needed because of deceptive advertising and other practices that often give women the misimpression that the centers are medically-based and offer abortion. (Megan, 2/11)

A California judge ruled Monday that the names of 14 Planned Parenthood workers and others will remain sealed during the prosecution of two anti-abortion activists charged with secretly recording them. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Christopher Hite made the ruling despite the publication of the names on an anti-abortion website over the weekend. Hite said he would punish anyone discovered to have provided the names, which have been ordered to be kept confidential since charges were filed in 2017 against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress. (Elias, 2/11)

Oxiris Barbot is waiting patiently to hold the baby. A pediatrician, Dr. Barbot is visiting an East New York apartment on a recent morning to observe a staff member as she counsels a postpartum mother on breast-feeding, safe sleeping practices and general pediatric care. This home-visit program is one of hundreds offered by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which Dr. Barbot now leads as its commissioner. Hers is one of the highest-profile jobs in the public health field. (West, 2/11)

Thousands of Texans seeking government help with surprise medical bills were hit with another shock last year: a clogged-up consumer protection bureaucracy. A massive backlog that began last summer left state regulators unable to provide timely help to the thousands of Texans who requested mediation from the Texas Department of Insurance. (Root and Najmabadi, 2/12)

The horror of the shooting here nearly a year ago that left 17 people dead crosses Ina Berlingeri-Vincenty’s mind every morning when she drops her son Nico off at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Before he gets out of the car, she says, “I make sure I say, ‘I love you.’” (Campo-Flores, 2/12)

The 12 hospitals in the Partners Health care system have regained access to the medical records network after the state’s largest health care provider resolved a technical problem, a Partners Health Care system spokesman said Monday around 9:15 a.m. The medical records network was down for hours Monday, forcing the cancellation of a “small number” of non-urgent surgical procedures and delays in some other appointments, said Partners spokesman Rich Copp. (Ellement, 2/11)

Conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth remains legal across most of the country, and much of our region. But right now, Colorado is considering a statewide ban on the practice. It includes various kinds of treatments intended to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. (Mullen, 2/11)

An internal review by Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital has found more than a dozen incidents in which children in the hospital’s heart unit were harmed by the care they received. The cases should have been immediately reported to state officials, the hospital’s interim president told employees during private town halls this week. None were reported until recently. The hospital’s former leaders also didn’t properly notify the board of trustees about safety concerns in the heart surgery department. That led to the federal government’s recent declaration that All Children’s had left patients in danger, the interim president said. (McGrory and Bedi, 2/9)

California has never had a surgeon general, but that will change today. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a San Francisco-based pediatrician, has pioneered research into the effect that childhood traumas have on health. As the state’s top doctor, Burke Harris will act in an advisory capacity to Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Orr, 2/11)

A pair of private equity firms have officially acquired Watertown health information technology firm athenahealth.The company said Monday that the $5.7 billion transaction announced late last year is complete. Athenahealth is now a private company owned by Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital, an arm of the activist hedge fund Elliott Management. (Rosen, 2/11)

The Arizona Department of Health Services, along with the state medical and nursing boards, have opened investigations into what may have gone wrong in a hospital "patient dumping" case revealed by The Arizona Republic. Martin, a mentally impaired man who had been missing for months, was found at a bus stop with an amputated foot, The Republic reported in January. (Sanders, 2/11)

Workers who manage assets at Eagan-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota look after a portfolio of investments and holdings with a value of roughly $1.6 billion. Over the past 12 months, Blue Cross officials have decided to try leveraging this expertise by creating a business called Aware Asset Management, a federally registered investment adviser that large companies including other insurers can hire for help with managing investments. (Snowbeck, 2/11)

California Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, will introduce legislation Monday that would prevent law enforcement from arresting and charging sex workers who come forward as victims or witnesses to serious crimes. The proposed law, SB233, would also prevent officers from using condoms as probable cause to arrest a sex worker in any situation. (Sernoffsky, 2/11)

Beginning this week, agencies that help get food to hungry Iowans are expanding their services. The Des Moines area’s DMARC Mobile Food Pantry will add four more stops to its schedule, which will provide a healthy, three-day supply of food to some people who haven’t been able to get it from other food pantry locations. (Mayer, 2/11)

Johns Hopkins University now plans to make over a 1930s-era hospital building on the edge of its Homewood campus that was originally established by Congress to care for sick and disabled seamen for academic purposes. The building, originally the 290-bed Baltimore Marine Hospital, has served many public, private, university purposes over the decades. It was marked for demolition at one point to make way for several Hopkins health system buildings, but university officials now say they plan to keep the structure. (Cohn, 2/12)

As baby boomers head into retirement, and many young people move away in search of opportunity, Maine is one of only two states, along with West Virginia, where deaths now outnumber births. That gulf is reshaping life here in myriad ways, from shrinking the workforce to intensifying the demand for services for the elderly, and it will only widen in the coming years, demographers predict. (MacQuarrie, 2/11)

The map of the United States shows four blue dots clustered in northern Georgia. They represent the metro Atlanta counties of Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb.It’s not exactly surprising that the four — the most populous in our state — are among 48 counties in the nation that the Trump administration is targeting for its plan to stop the spread of HIV. (Miller, 2/11)

Gov. Brian Kemp visited a pair of schools Monday to shine a spotlight on a new initiative tucked into his state budget proposal aimed at addressing mental health problems at Georgia schools. The spending plan steers an extra $8.4 million to the Apex program, an organization that the Kemp administration views as crucial to identifying and counseling troubled students while also targeting issues that health experts say could threaten school safety. (Bluestein, 2/11)

The Republican loss of the House last November brought an official end (at least through 2020) to the party’s long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats, despite their new majority, won’t be able to pass their health care agenda either, because the Republican president and Senate will block it. That political stalemate could mean nothing gets done on health care for several years. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are pressing problems that need attention—problems both parties agree on, such as inadequate coverage for many people below the poverty line, high premiums and an unstable market for individual insurance, and rising costs across the board. (Lanhee J. Chen and James C. Capretta, 2/12)

Last Valentine’s Day, a year ago this Thursday, classes were wrapping up at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former student with a semiautomatic rifle murdered 17 people and wounded 17 others. It so happens that this Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will move to advance legislation requiring background checks on all firearm sales. The killer in the Parkland, Fla., school massacre passed such a check, but this measure would close a loophole exploited by other killers that exempts unlicensed gun sellers from conducting background checks. Support for such a change is overwhelmingly popular, even among gun owners. The bill has an excellent chance of passing the Democrat-led House. Its prospects in the Senate, controlled by the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, are bleak. (2/11)

In American political life, the right and the left exist in largely separate spheres. But there is at least one place where the two sides of the divide overlap: the anti-vaccination movement. Despite overwhelming evidence that vaccinations are safe and protect against dangerous disease, small groups of Americans, on both the left and right, have chosen to reject vaccines for themselves and their children. Their decisions have consequences, as we have seen in Washington state’s Clark County recently. A measles outbreak there has already infected 50 people with no end in sight. (Wendy Orent, 2/10)

Nearly every authority agrees; we are in the midst of a public health epidemic. In November, the American Medical Association, representing the nation’s physicians, called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take action against the “urgent public health epidemic” of skyrocketing e-cigarette use. ... What’s made this epidemic so dangerous — besides recent vape-pen malfunctions — is the soaring adoption rate by youth. (Dr. Jonathan Fielding, 2/11)

When He Jiankui announced that he had “edited” two embryos in hopes of ensuring they would become immune to the virus that causes AIDS, he also announced his opposition to using the same gene-editing technologies to enhance children’s IQs. As scientists were quick to point out, the pathways from genes to intelligence are just too complex for such enhancement to be feasible. For the foreseeable future, editing embryos to enhance IQ is a sci-fi fantasy. A different approach aimed at enhancing IQ is far less fantastic. We’re calling it embryo profiling, and it could be done today. (Erik Parens, Paul Applebaum and Wendy Chung, 2/12)

In the most recent legal battle pitting healthcare providers against their hometown governments, two Pennsylvania municipal agencies last month sued two not-for-profit hospital systems. The goal was to regain property taxes by proving the not-for-profits operate very much like for-profits. It's played out in state after state. Cash-strapped local officials eye the behemoths taking up blocks of valuable land while paying zero taxes year after year, despite turning a profit. They start questioning what those hospital systems have done for them lately. Health fairs usually don't cut it. (Aurora Aguilar, 2/9)

The problem of sexual harassment and assault in the United States military has been widely reported, often — though not always — framed as predominantly women’s issue. However, more than half of survivors are men (though a higher percent of military women are assaulted, the total number of men is higher since men make up 85 percent of the total force). How do these men fare if they subsequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of being harassed or assaulted and file a claim with VA? (Kayla Williams, 2/11)

I have been watching with great interest the reactions to Bruce Booth’s thoughtful observations about this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. He noted the number of ways the conference has changed and that its value to his company, Atlas Venture, has greatly diminished. Booth’s thoughts have been echoed on Twitter and elsewhere by a number of attendees. ... I’d like to offer some historical perspective on its evolution and my thoughts on where it is today, and also ask for your ideas on how to make it better. (Dennis Purcell, 2/12)

The child separation "zero tolerance" policy was even more cruel and inhumane than we thought, apparently, it went on for a lot longer than we thought it did, and the government now says that it may not be possible to completely fix it. Which means that America may be known as a country that separated thousands of migrant children from their families at the border, doesn't know how many there are out there, and may not be able to reunite them all. (EJ Montini, 2/9)

I started my transgender journey as a 4-year-old boy when my grandmother repeatedly, over several years, cross-dressed me in a full-length purple dress she made especially for me and told me how pretty I was as a girl. This planted the seed of gender confusion and led to my transitioning at age 42 to transgender female. I lived as “Laura” for eight years, but, as I now know, transitioning doesn’t fix the underlying ailments. (Walt Heyer, 2/11)

“Medicare for All” sounds good, but it’s a phony name. Beware of the bait and switch. The “Medicare for All” legislation, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders  (I-Vt.) and cosponsored by many high-profile Democrats, keeps the name “Medicare” but nothing else. The legislation actually abolishes Medicare and Medicare Advantage, and outlaws employer-provided coverage and the private insurance people buy for themselves. Everyone automatically will be enrolled in the same one-size-fits-all public coverage, whether they work or not. Children will be signed up at birth. (Betsy McCaughey, 2/11)

Credit Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with the vision to see universal health care as a public issue whose time has come, and for the bumper sticker slogan, Medicare-for-All. As income inequality widens, equality in health care takes on a new urgency. We have excellent technological breakthroughs in medicine. In my 23 years as a registered nurse we have gone from X-rays with leaded vests to non-invasive 3D Echo, an ultrasound imaging done at bedside and producing three-dimensional pictures a grade schooler could interpret. Laboratory diagnostic provide fast and amazing analyses of blood, tissue and other fluids. With laser and laparoscopy surgery, 12-inch incisions and two-week recoveries are a thing of the past. (Tom Deegan, 2/11)

We are now nearly two decades out from the original publication of many of the studies examined by the IOM, yet we are still grappling with stark disparities in both disease outcomes and treatment. And, although “the incidence and mortality rates of colorectal cancer in the United States has steadily declined” over the years, according to the 2016 study, “reductions have been strikingly much slower among African Americans.” (Monica Maalouf, 2/11)

In December, the American-Statesman’s Unwatched investigative report detailed those findings and highlighted glaring gaps in state oversight of child care facilities. We argued then that Texas needs to impose stiffer penalties for facilities with dangerous violations, raise the standards for the least-regulated kind of day cares and make more information available to parents deciding where to enroll their kids. (2/8)

Does over-prescribing of opioids lie at the heart of the addiction crisis? Some members of Philadelphia City Council along with many public health experts think so. Last week, a bill came before City Council to limit the activities of pharmaceutical sales representatives, also known as detailers, who promote prescription drugs to physicians. (Robert Field, 2/11)

Arizona needs a school safety bill that includes age-appropriate trauma-informed training for school resource officers (SROs). It’s important because the role of schools is to provide a safe environment for everyone every day. Students that are young, disabled, have special needs or are disruptive don’t always get this freedom. (Katie Paetz, 2/11)