Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The Washington Post: How Local Journalists Proved A 10-Year-Old’s Abortion Wasn’t A Hoax
It felt like half the country doubted the case existed. The Indianapolis Star had published a story July 1 about a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion because of new restrictions in her home state. An indignant President Biden cited the story a week later as an example of extreme abortion laws, and his political opponents pounced. They suggested it was a lie or a hoax. A national newspaper’s editorial board concluded it was “too good to confirm.” Even Ohio’s attorney general called it a “fabrication.” (Izadi, 7/28)
The Wall Street Journal: Big Hospitals Provide Skimpy Charity Care—Despite Billions In Tax Breaks
Nonprofit hospitals get billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for providing support to their communities. A Wall Street Journal analysis shows they are often not particularly generous. These charitable organizations, which comprise the majority of hospitals in the U.S., wrote off in aggregate 2.3% of their patient revenue on financial aid for patients’ medical bills. Their for-profit competitors, a category including publicly traded giants such as HCA Healthcare Inc., wrote off 3.4%, the Journal found in an analysis of the most-recent annual reports hospitals file with the federal government. (Wilde Matthews, McGinty and Evans, 7/25)
Stat: For Drugmakers And The FDA, Trials On Ultra-Rare Diseases Pose Challenges
In the U.S., a rare disease is defined as any condition that afflicts 200,000 people or fewer. There are an estimated 7,000 such diseases, according to the FDA. But there is no legal or regulatory bright line to distinguish ultra-rare diseases, other than an informal rule of thumb that such diseases affect one patient per 50,000 people, or fewer than 20 patients in a population of 1 million people. That arbitrary definition works out to about 6,000 patients in the U.S. (Silverman, 7/26)
In a suite of stories, USA Today explored the obesity epidemic in the US —
USA Today: Obesity Rate In America: Overweight People Are Blamed Despite Research
The vast majority of people find it almost impossible to lose substantial weight and keep it off. Medicine no longer sees this as a personal failing. In recent years, faced with reams of scientific evidence, the medical community has begun to stop blaming patients for not losing excess pounds. (Weintraub, 7/26)
Meanwhile, it was the anniversary of a shocking piece of health news —
AP: How An AP Reporter Broke The Tuskegee Syphilis Story
The U.S. Public Health Service called it “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The world would soon come to know it simply as the “Tuskegee Study” — one of the biggest medical scandals in U.S. history, an atrocity that continues to fuel mistrust of government and health care among Black Americans. (Breed, 7/25)
