Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Poverty Has Deadly Health Consequences; Is Therapy Always The Answer For Struggling Kids?
The New York Times: Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty
Safety-net hospitals and clinics care for a population heavily skewed toward the poor, recent immigrants and people of color. The budgets of these places are forever tight. And anyone who works in them could tell you that illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies. (Lindsay Ryan, 4/11)
Dallas Morning News: Therapy Is The Air Our Kids Breathe. But It’s Not Always Good
We parents have become so frantic, hypervigilant and borderline obsessive about our kids’ mental health that we routinely allow all manner of mental health experts to evict us from the room. (“We will let you know.”) We’ve been relying on them for decades to tell us how to raise well-adjusted kids. Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite: That psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids. (Abigail Shrier, 4/11)
The Washington Post: Kill The Zombies! Undead Laws Can Come Back To Bite You
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban, some 50 years moribund, sprung back to life, shutting down Planned Parenthood’s clinics for more than a year. Arizona’s 1864 ban similarly wrought horror-movie havoc after Dobbs; no one knew whether it or a more recent, less restrictive ban took precedence. As the Arizona Supreme Court just decided: the zombie lives. (Kate Cohen, 4/10)
Roll Call: Taxing Health Insurance: The Republican Zombie That Refuses To Die
On March 20, the Republican Study Committee, a voluntary body that includes 80 percent of the Republican House Caucus — including Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. — released its budget plan for fiscal year 2025. This release deservedly received a lot of media attention based on its plan to raise the Social Security retirement age, adopt an extreme national abortion ban, and “voucherize” Medicare. Each of these actions piles more costs and burdens onto middle-class Americans and codifies draconian restrictions on the privacy rights of women and families to make reproductive health care decisions. (Rep. Joe Courtney, 4/10)
Stat: 3 Steps To Rebuilding Trust In Public Health
It’s no surprise in today’s corrosive political environment that trust in government is near an all-time low. That’s a big problem. Communities with more trust during the Covid-19 pandemic had fewer deaths and less economic devastation. (Tom Frieden, 4/11)
