Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Equality In Medicine; Title X; And Police Promoting Addiction Treatment
The New Yorker: Curiosity And What Equality Really Means
One night, on my surgery rotation, during my third year of medical school, I followed my chief resident into the trauma bay in the emergency department. We’d been summoned to see a prisoner who’d swallowed half a razor blade and slashed his left wrist with the corner of the crimp on a toothpaste tube. He was about thirty, built like a boxer, with a tattooed neck, hands shackled to the gurney, and gauze around his left wrist showing bright crimson seeping through. (Atul Gawande, 6/2)
The Dallas Morning News: The Preventable Tragedy Of D’ashon Morris
The Dallas Morning News spent a year investigating the way Texas treats fragile and ailing residents who rely on Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled.We reviewed more than 70,000 pages of documents, including patient medical records and material that state officials and the companies tried to keep secret. We crunched financial and insurance-industry data and talked to hundreds of families, doctors and policy experts. (J. David McSwane and Andrew Chavez, 6/6)
The Atlantic: 'More Than A Gag Rule'
Late last month, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that could prohibit doctors who receive a type of federal funding called Title X from explicitly referring their patients to abortion providers. Under the new rule, only a pregnant woman who has already decided she wants an abortion—rather than one who is simply weighing her options—could be given a list of medical providers, and not all of the providers can be abortion providers. The rule might still be changed before it goes into effect. (Olga Khazan, 6/4)
Politico: ‘The Police Aren’t Just Getting You In Trouble. They Actually Care.’
She watched her sister dying, slumped over her kitchen table, unconscious and gasping. When the police and paramedics came, they turned her sister onto the floor and sprayed naloxone up her nose—once, then a second dose. The anti-opiate did its work in minutes: Her sister woke up. (Erick Trickey, 6/2)
Slate: Her Unmanageable Body
The amazing thing about [Porochista] Khakpour’s book is the way she recognizes that any illness in modern life—anything that bumps us off our “path,” that puts us face to face with our imperfections, our limitations, and the uncloseable gap between ourselves and our best selves—inevitably enters the mind. I hope Khakpour’s memoir isn’t relegated to the health section of the bookstore or of Amazon, because it’s not really about Lyme, or not most deeply about Lyme—it’s about modern life. (Eve Fairbanks, 6/4)
