Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Abortion Must Be Legalized Nationwide; A New Way To Discuss Gender Identity
Houston Chronicle: Since The Fall Of Roe V. Wade, Our Patients Are Afraid. And So Are We
In the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women in Texas have been robbed of their freedoms. They are understandably scared — and we physicians are too. (Kim D. Vernon and Anita Beasley, 7/8)
The New York Times: A Psychiatrist’s New Pitch For Talking About Gender Identity
Talking about gender understandably brings up a lot of feelings. We’re having heated discussions around bathroom bills, gender-affirming medical care and transgender athletes. Politicians opine about the dangers of “gender ideology” in schools and children being “mutilated and sterilized.” Others have decried the rise in adolescents identifying as transgender and nonbinary as a “social contagion,” likening gender diversity to a disease. (Jack Turban, 7/8)
Modern Healthcare: Why Nonprofit Hospitals Need To Make A Margin
Nonprofit hospitals and health systems recognize that their tax-exempt status comes with the responsibility to deliver on their mission to care for the communities they serve. Reflective of that responsibility, those organizations provided nearly $130 billion in total benefits to their communities in 2020, based on the most recent data available. That’s a $20 billion increase from the prior year despite it being during one of the most significant and challenging periods in healthcare history. (Sister Mary Haddad and Rick Pollack, 7/9)
Newsweek: The FDA Just Quietly Gutted Protections For Human Subjects In Research
Late last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly introduced a regulation that may be one of the most important shifts in how non-profit and for-profit U.S. institutions, both at home and abroad, conduct future medical and public health research. It represents an erosion of personal medical choice and threatens to undermine the public's trust in scientific investigations in biomedicine. (Tom Nicholson & Jay Bhattacharya, 7/8)
Stat: Private Equity Funding For Developing New Neurologic Therapies
Neurological diseases are now the leading cause of poor health and disability worldwide. An estimated 3.4 billion people, or 40% of the world’s population, are affected by neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, stroke, migraine, depression, anxiety, neonatal encephalopathy, and more. Efforts to expand research that can lead to new and more effective treatments for neurological diseases are sorely needed. So are new strategies to address the many unique challenges that often limit progress in developing therapies for these diseases. (Bruce Leuchter, 7/9)
