Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Black Market Insulin; Opioid Deaths; Birth Control Access
NBC News: Desperate Families Driven To Black Market Insulin
Fourth grader Gabriella Corley is trapped. She has type-1 diabetes and is allergic to the kind of insulin her insurer makes affordable — and her family can't pay for the kind she needs every day to stay alive. (Ben Popken, 4/25)
The Atlantic: How To Make Primary Care Transgender-Friendly
The medical knowledge needed to provide transgender-affirming care is not particularly complex — “it’s about as difficult as managing menopause,” says Madeline Deutsch, the clinical leader of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and and the author of the center’s transgender-care guidelines.Yet physicians often perceive transgender care as hopelessly enigmatic. (Keren Landman, 4/21)
Vox: The Opioid Epidemic May Be Even Deadlier Than We Think
he opioid epidemic has led to the deadliest drug crisis in US history — deadlier than the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. Drug overdoses now cause more deaths than gun violence and car crashes. They even caused more deaths in 2015 than HIV/AIDS did at the height of the epidemic in 1995.A new study, however, suggests that we may be in fact underestimating the death toll of the opioid epidemic and current drug crisis. And we don’t even know by how much. (German Lopez, 4/26)
FiveThirtyEight: Some States Are Making It Easier To Get Birth Control
Two months into the Trump presidency, the fate of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate is still undecided. But although the Trump administration hasn’t yet changed or removed the controversial regulation that requires insurance companies to cover birth control without making patients share the cost, many states are introducing or revising legislation to shore up or expand access to birth control. And if the federal mandate changes, that could mean that access to contraception could vary more and more widely between states. (Amelia Thomson-Deveaux, 4/24)
Vox: America’s Health Care Cost Problem Might Shut Down Hollywood
If you miss out on the last few episodes of Saturday Night Live this summer, blame America’s decades-long struggle to bring its health care costs under control. The Writers Guild of America, the union that represents television and film writers, could go on strike as early as May 2 — and a big reason why is the cost of health care. (Dylan Scott, 4/24)
